Life in the Greatest Country
I have decided that it is a good time to reiterate the general outlines of what I believe is going on in our country and the world. Here is what I have believed at least since the time of Reagan, and which I still believe:
The industrial revolution is not over. Most people think this is something that began and ended in the nineteenth century, but what began with the elimination of virtually all agricultural employment, and with it over 90% of the jobs that existed in the United States and Europe in 1800, continues today. Technology has devastated industrial jobs and is now eating away at service and professional jobs that we all believed could never be replaced. These jobs are not coming back. There are never again, barring some sort of plague that wipes out three quarters of the earth's population, going to be enough "jobs," i.e. people getting paid to make money for other, richer people, to go around. It has been obvious to me for four decades that this fact is going to result in either a guaranteed minimum income and universal health care, or in a complete breakdown of society.
Global warming is a far greater threat than most people realize. To cite just one example, scientists estimate that by 2050 a large area of the Middle East and North Africa will become uninhabitable, with daytime temperatures being deadly throughout much of the year. This will displace hundreds of millions of people, making the Syrian refugee crisis look like a minor inconvenience, and probably totally devastating civilization in Europe and much of South Asia. And this is just one consequence of global warming; others have received far more publicity, but are discounted by half of all Americans as a result of a fifty year long campaign of lies spread by energy companies, and other rich people who have no intention of paying their share to keep our country viable.
The disparity between the rich and the rest of us is growing so fast that within a couple of decades, the total wealth of the United States will have accrued in the hands of no more than two or three hundred families, with the rest of the country living in conditions of abject poverty and imminent starvation, with no permanent housing, no medical care and no hope of upward mobility, something which is already largely a fiction in the United States. The end result of such a condition is violent revolution and destruction of the most basic fabric of civilization.
What is still called a political party, the Republican party to be specific, ceased several decades ago to be a party in the sense that the Democrats are, or the Tories or Labor party, or previous parties in this country, and has become nothing but a gigantic criminal conspiracy to transfer the wealth of the country into the hands of a hundred or two hundred people, who will be rendered so rich that they will be able to finance unstoppable campaigns to keep their corrupt tools in power. This goal seems to have been already achieved.
The Republican party, as one of the chief goals of their criminal campaign of "deregulation" made it possible for the entire mainstream press to be purchased by a few rich sociopaths, and converted into a propaganda tool for the Republicans, who are themselves nothing but a paid, corrupt front group for the aforementioned rich sociopaths.
The Republicans realized long ago that their true goals, which cannot be really hidden, and which offer nothing but disaster to the vast majority of Americans, could never be sold to the voting populace, so they began a systematic scheme to craft a voting base which had had its greed and lust for hatred and violence so triggered that it would utterly ignore its own interests, and vote on the basis of that greed and hatred. In the course of doing this, the Republicans consciously crafted an entirely fictitious world view, featuring such things as the absurd doctrine of supply side economics, which promised that everyone would soon be rich, and an endless series of utterly bogus threats like Sharia law and terrorism, which have fed the greed and hatred of their base, and prevented them from seeing that the obvious threat to their existence comes from the rich people who are attempting to reduce them to penury, not the endless series of alleged foreign threats that right wingers constantly see behind every corner.
And finally, and most importantly, it is the barely concealed intent of the leaders of the Republican party to reduce the United States to an oligarchic dictatorship, in which the lives of virtually all Americans are reduced to a level barely sufficient to keep them alive.
The Democrats, on the other hand, while still retaining many of the features of a traditional political party and still to some degree working for the good of the majority of Americans, have been threatened and intimidated into refusing to acknowledge the above facts, which must be clear by this point to any halfway conscious observer, rendering their viability as an opposition party marginal at best.
And that's where we are today. I'm hardly the only person to have seen all of this. It is, after all, completely obvious to anyone who really wants to see what is going on; but it has been so systematically shouted down that its truths seem to exist only on the fringes of American political life, where they can be dismissed as nothing but the left wing equivalent of the hateful lies from the right, which I have spent so long documenting here.
So, the overwhelming likelihood is that the age of America is over; that we are witnessing the deliberate destruction of everything of value that this country ever had or stood for, not by foreign enemies, but by the very people who have benefited the most from the American way of life, in pursuit of short term gain. I would be surprised to come back in a hundred years and even find that the United States still existed; instead what we will see are a few viable countries, located largely on the West Coast and Northeast, with nothing but a third world hell in between, filled with people so propagandized that, as they starve to death, they will still believe that they live in The Greatest Country In The World.
The industrial revolution is not over. Most people think this is something that began and ended in the nineteenth century, but what began with the elimination of virtually all agricultural employment, and with it over 90% of the jobs that existed in the United States and Europe in 1800, continues today. Technology has devastated industrial jobs and is now eating away at service and professional jobs that we all believed could never be replaced. These jobs are not coming back. There are never again, barring some sort of plague that wipes out three quarters of the earth's population, going to be enough "jobs," i.e. people getting paid to make money for other, richer people, to go around. It has been obvious to me for four decades that this fact is going to result in either a guaranteed minimum income and universal health care, or in a complete breakdown of society.
Global warming is a far greater threat than most people realize. To cite just one example, scientists estimate that by 2050 a large area of the Middle East and North Africa will become uninhabitable, with daytime temperatures being deadly throughout much of the year. This will displace hundreds of millions of people, making the Syrian refugee crisis look like a minor inconvenience, and probably totally devastating civilization in Europe and much of South Asia. And this is just one consequence of global warming; others have received far more publicity, but are discounted by half of all Americans as a result of a fifty year long campaign of lies spread by energy companies, and other rich people who have no intention of paying their share to keep our country viable.
The disparity between the rich and the rest of us is growing so fast that within a couple of decades, the total wealth of the United States will have accrued in the hands of no more than two or three hundred families, with the rest of the country living in conditions of abject poverty and imminent starvation, with no permanent housing, no medical care and no hope of upward mobility, something which is already largely a fiction in the United States. The end result of such a condition is violent revolution and destruction of the most basic fabric of civilization.
What is still called a political party, the Republican party to be specific, ceased several decades ago to be a party in the sense that the Democrats are, or the Tories or Labor party, or previous parties in this country, and has become nothing but a gigantic criminal conspiracy to transfer the wealth of the country into the hands of a hundred or two hundred people, who will be rendered so rich that they will be able to finance unstoppable campaigns to keep their corrupt tools in power. This goal seems to have been already achieved.
The Republican party, as one of the chief goals of their criminal campaign of "deregulation" made it possible for the entire mainstream press to be purchased by a few rich sociopaths, and converted into a propaganda tool for the Republicans, who are themselves nothing but a paid, corrupt front group for the aforementioned rich sociopaths.
The Republicans realized long ago that their true goals, which cannot be really hidden, and which offer nothing but disaster to the vast majority of Americans, could never be sold to the voting populace, so they began a systematic scheme to craft a voting base which had had its greed and lust for hatred and violence so triggered that it would utterly ignore its own interests, and vote on the basis of that greed and hatred. In the course of doing this, the Republicans consciously crafted an entirely fictitious world view, featuring such things as the absurd doctrine of supply side economics, which promised that everyone would soon be rich, and an endless series of utterly bogus threats like Sharia law and terrorism, which have fed the greed and hatred of their base, and prevented them from seeing that the obvious threat to their existence comes from the rich people who are attempting to reduce them to penury, not the endless series of alleged foreign threats that right wingers constantly see behind every corner.
And finally, and most importantly, it is the barely concealed intent of the leaders of the Republican party to reduce the United States to an oligarchic dictatorship, in which the lives of virtually all Americans are reduced to a level barely sufficient to keep them alive.
The Democrats, on the other hand, while still retaining many of the features of a traditional political party and still to some degree working for the good of the majority of Americans, have been threatened and intimidated into refusing to acknowledge the above facts, which must be clear by this point to any halfway conscious observer, rendering their viability as an opposition party marginal at best.
And that's where we are today. I'm hardly the only person to have seen all of this. It is, after all, completely obvious to anyone who really wants to see what is going on; but it has been so systematically shouted down that its truths seem to exist only on the fringes of American political life, where they can be dismissed as nothing but the left wing equivalent of the hateful lies from the right, which I have spent so long documenting here.
So, the overwhelming likelihood is that the age of America is over; that we are witnessing the deliberate destruction of everything of value that this country ever had or stood for, not by foreign enemies, but by the very people who have benefited the most from the American way of life, in pursuit of short term gain. I would be surprised to come back in a hundred years and even find that the United States still existed; instead what we will see are a few viable countries, located largely on the West Coast and Northeast, with nothing but a third world hell in between, filled with people so propagandized that, as they starve to death, they will still believe that they live in The Greatest Country In The World.
Comments
And finally, and most importantly, it is the barely concealed intent of the leaders of the Republican party to reduce the United States to an oligarchic dictatorship, in which the lives of virtually all Americans are reduced to a level barely sufficient to keep them alive.
Their goal is a return to turn the use intoa modern Holy Roman Empire, in which a few noble house determine the leadership and the population are reduced to serfs in perpetual bondage.
This, if they succeed in their goals, will rapidly plunge the US and the entire world into a cataclysmic breakdown of civilization, the likes of which the world has never seen; the equivalent of Somalia or the South Sudan played out on a worldwide scale. This will plunge the whole world into a dark age far worse than what happened in the Medieval period, and by breaking down any worldwide ability to act on climate issues, it will very possibly mark the end of the human race and most other forms of animal and plant life. There will be no emerging back to civilization short of the hundreds of millions of years that it will then take for advanced life to evolve from primitive sea creatures, or things like cockroaches that can survive the destruction. Okay, that's enough depression for one day, right? The one good thing I can point to is that Keith Richards will still be here to see to it that, however bad things get, rock never dies.
"and I'm sure you consider the sane people the Liberals the brain-dead Democrats and the ones willing to go along with the influx of sharia law and Islam in this country.
people like you are the very problem in this country because you don't have the ability to have rational thought your Guided by how you feel and you think feelings are science and they're not they're simply feelings based on point of view so fuck your point of view. Along with Muhammad the pedophile prophet in all his brain dead followers"
I wouldn't want you to think that I would not publish your comment, Cocooned1, just because I disagreed with you. I would never pass up an opportunity to demonstrate what ignorant, stupid assholes conservatives are. Thanks for the contribution, but not too much of this sort of thing, because if repeated it does annoy my more serious readers.
And the Stones even have a song for it.
link, and you take your chances.