The American Empire is Going Bankrupt While the Oligarchs Go Fishing
Gary Null and Richard Gale
Progressive Radio Network, October 29, 2019
The progressive website Common Dreams printed an article this week entitled, “What is the Fed Not Telling Us: Fears of Economic Instability After Central Bank Intervention Spikes.” The most important statement is the last sentence quoting Northman Trader’s Sven Heinreich: “a financial system that requires over $100B of liquidity injections every day, temporary, permanent or otherwise, has major issues.”
It is doubtful that most Americans would understand that the Federal Reserve is flooding the financial market with $100 billion daily. Yet you would never hear this reported on the major news networks. Instead, we hear incessant reporting about Trump’s impeachment every day and all day. What is missing are the dire warnings that we may be approaching another 2008 economic meltdown and worse.
But that is not the only thing the major media is failing to report. There have been multiple studies released this week warning us about climate change. The release of methane gas from millions of square miles in the Arctic region is higher than previously expected. This is the most massive release of methane on a scale never observed before in human history. This could also suddenly change all of the earlier climate metrics about global warming and challenge our very survival on the planet.
Nor are we reading on the front page news or hearing from our pundits any mention of a Scientific American article in its October 17 issue. The article written by University of California at Berkeley professor Joel Moskowitz, “We Have No Reason to Believe 5G is Safe,” identifies the serious health risks posed by the rollout of 5G technology. Thousands of scientists internationally have signed a letter to governments warning that 5G is a disaster and perhaps the single worst health threat in world history. To date there are over 10,000 peer-reviewed studies providing confirmation that 5G will lead us into an era of untold injury to human life and the environment.
Nor are we hearing from the media any word about a recent Stanford University report published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science suggesting that carbon capture technologies may potentially cause more harm than good. Consequently, all of our global efforts to reverse carbon dioxide release trends through technological carbon capture has uncertain proof it will work. Quoting Prof. Mark Jacobson at Stanford, the article reports, “Even if you have 100 percent capture from the capture equipment, it is still worse, from a social cost perspective, than replacing a coal or gas plant with a wind farm because carbon capture never reduces air pollution and always has a capture equipment cost. Wind replacing fossil fuels always reduces air pollution and never has a capture equipment cost.”
Last year the US increased its carbon dioxide footprint by 2.3 percent and it will increase further this year following Trump’s orgy of deregulations. But again, the media is not telling us anything about this.
Again this week, Constitutional attorney and scholar John Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute shared his insights about how the majority of Americans and our legislators are living in a state of delusion. He writes, “the hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: no independent thought, conform, submit, stay asleep, buy, watch TV, no imagination, and do not question authority.” Whitehead argues our stupor is contributing to the emergence of a new American police state, what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls the “dictatorship of democracy, the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.” He later references a critical Princeton and Northwestern University study that concluded,
“the US government does not represent the majority of American citizens.. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.”
In addition, our media rarely makes any truthful mention of the epidemic of diseases that can be attributed to the standard American lifestyle. These illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, many cancers, obesity, rampant anxiety and mental disorders in children and young adults, etc, are preventable. But that would require our media being honest about the science and reporting it truthfully to Americans rather than rely upon the drug industry for its talking points.
Nor is there any reporting about the day-to-day plight and challenges of over half of the American population, approximately 170 million citizens. This includes the 16 million children who go to bed hungry every night, and the 2.5 million school children living on the streets or in cars.
Nor is there an honest discussion and debate across the media’s airwaves about the militarization of local law enforcement and our government’s role in orchestrating 51 regime changes and coups since the Second World War in other nations to support despotic, fascist and totalitarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Brazil and Honduras.
Consequently, the US has become a nation filled with hubris, indifference and life-fatigue. We keep ourselves chronically distracted. We fail to hold the oligarchs who are responsible for widespread inequality and the destruction of the country’s social fabric accountable. Rather they worsen our culture through equity partnerships and outsourcing jobs for the past four decades.
The socio-economic engineers of the global economy have put the world in its current dire predicament where millions no longer have access to drinking water and their lives are further threatened by the oligarchic destruction of natural resources. It is as if the ruling elite and corporations are protected by an allegiance of foundations and think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Business Roundtable, and of course the World Bank and IMF. And the mainstream media, controlled by the oligarchic class and special corporate interests, dutifully parrots their masters’ talking points without seeing the irony that they have been fully captured and serve as the propagandists for our dystopian malaise. Ergo, nothing changes.
It says a great deal about the nation when we are immersed in student debt and younger generations will have to find ways to thrive in a prison of debt peonage. We will not see those in power forgive the student debt, the same corporate controlled legislators who forgave 100 percent of Wall Street’s debt through TARP and other free handouts.
Consider our greater debt:
National Debt is at $23 trillion, with the US Total Debt at $74 trillion
State debt is $1.2 trillion with $6.8 unfunded pension liabilities
Local debt is at $1.2 trillion
Social Security Liability $20 trillion
Medicare Liability $31 trillion
US Unfunded Liabilities $126.5 trillion
$6.9 trillion of the debt is held by foreign nations
Mortgage debt $15.8 trillion
Student debt $1.6 trillion
Credit Card debt $1.1 trillion
In addition, last month SEC Chairman Jay Clayton announced that America’s corporate debt has reached almost $10 trillion, which is about half of the nation’s annual GDP. That leaves the national debt of the nation at over $244 trillion.
How much more debt needs to be piled up before we begin to realize we are totally bankrupt?
It is obscene that the Fed would be handing out $100 billion daily to corporations while the rest of the nation morphs into a banana republic. It is a frightening reality that the majority of Americans refuse to face.
We are being distracted by assuming that the only problem we have is to replace an incompetent president, who is simply a product and symptom of past White House mistakes and neglect. Democrats delude themselves into believing that getting Trump removed from office we remedy everything. Certainly this failure to see behind the curtain is a harbinger for the rapid decline of the American empire.