On this Thanksgiving day when mainstream Americans gorge themselves with feasts, I
wonder what Native Americans make of the ex-middle class in the US
wailing in pain with the loss of their incomes, jobs and homes in this Second
(and possibly Final) Great Depression.
Enjoy
It's a strange kind of celebration that gives thanks for the moment in
time when immigrant zealots seized the "new world" and its bounteous resources
at gunpoint from the existing inhabitants, and consigned the latter to
concentration camps accorded the Orwellian name reservations.
All mod cons
The rest, they say, is history. The descendants of the land-grabbers
with their beautiful dominant genes have created a global system that
has codified theft by imperial conquest, reaching its apotheosis with
the Grand Larceny of Wall Street since 2007.
Those of our fellow globe dwellers who have always been shut out from
the feast may just shrug, and if they're feeling charitable, wanly welcome the
newly dispossessed to the ranks of the billions of also-rans on Planet D'earth.
I am staggered. The most momentus revelation surfaced on a TV news bulletin this past week. And I think virtually no one noticed among the debris of big angry storm Sandy and the equally malicious two-billion-dollar storm-in-a-teacup US election.
Isn't that typical of our fucked-up world.
I managed to grab a video link of this broadcast before it disappears forever into the cyber-dustbin of history. So without further ado, watch this three-minute long string of calm words and decide for yourself if you can believe what you're hearing - from a former member of the Ronald Reagan administration no less.
Click on the picture
This video clip was available online on 9 November 2012 at:
Dr Paul Craig Roberts worked at high level in the US government in the 1980s - a Republican adminstration, note - so this makes his frank summation of the state of the US government today all the more interesting.
Just in case the video is removed from the web, I will set out Dr Roberts' key points for the record:
Obama won the 2012 presidential election because he is less scary. His rhetoric is smooth and he's not threatening. Romney on the other hand was threatening, publicly writing off 47% of the electorate and showing he was completely under the thumb of the Israeli prime minister. Romney was a scary person compared to Obama.
Nothing will be any different in Obama's second term because the United States is not governed by the president or Congress or the political parties. It is governed by very powerful private interests - by Wall Street, the military-security complex, the Israel lobby, agri-business and the energy, timber and mining companies.
No president and no Congress can run afoul of these private interests.
Nothing will change. Nothing changed when Obama replaced Bush. The US continued to develop the police state, and continued with the suspension of the US Constitution, and the loss of due process and habeas corpus.
Obama furthered these measures when he declared he had the authority to assassinate American citizens without the due process of law. He codifed into law all the police state measures that Bush asserted. He restarted the war in Afghanistan.
Therefore nothing will change now - except the US will continue to issue too much debt, they will print too much money and this will continue to erode the acceptance of the dollar as the world's reserve currency and thus erode the power of the United States.
All the talk of the president wanting to work together with the Republican party for the sake of the country is just rhetoric. The only thing that's important to them is to save the banks and to stay on the right side of the military-security complex and Wall Street.
The presidential campaign was not about any of the real issues. The United States is the Constitution and in the 21st century, the US Constitution has been dismantled. But this was not even part of the election, there was no discussion.
How can you have liberty and freedom when the government can throw you in the dungeon for the rest of your life without due process? When they can shoot you down without due process? So far, the people say this is only for terrorists, it won't happen to us. But since no evidence is required, you don't know who it's happening to.
Dr Roberts had more to say but the news presenter cut him off.
Research has revealed that Dr Roberts was silenced by the mainstream media a few years back, despite an eminent career as a member of a previous US government and a well-published newspaper columnist. He suddenly found that his independent voice was unwanted by "news" organisations. The following video explains more:
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
Whether Dr Roberts falls foul of the "the authorities" for expressing these candid views on a Russian news channel just after Obama "won" the election remains to be seen. Whether I attract a knock on the door by repeating him here is also unclear. But I would hazard a guess that no one really cares who says what on this topic or just about any other. The deterioration of the public mind to a brain-dead state is all but complete, after more than a decade of Constant War on Terror propaganda, coupled with infantile "reality" television pumped out day after dulling day that has reduced critical thinking to barely registering on the intelligence scale.
There will be no revolution. The human race is tired of using its brain, and tired of fighting injustice and oppression to no avail. The earth is tired of the abuse we have meted out to the biosphere since the industrial revolution. If there was a god, it would be tired of us too and would have moved on to pastures new by now.
Read (re-read) Orwell for a forensic examination of the unyielding tendency of Homo sapiens to screw up the future for all but a handful of self-appointed masters, by building systems of control and oppression, generation after generation, in every country on the surface of this previously bountiful planet.
Whichever
way you look at it, we are all (as far as I know) part of the gene pool
that achieved global "dominance" at the expense of a colossal
proportion of the rest of the natural world. Think of us as the
descendants of thieves and marauders who raped and pillaged and laid
waste to everything in their path.
Americans and Britons in particular
can grasp this point via a rudimentary awareness of their country's
history, but on the larger scale all Homo so-called sapiens are party to
the vicious millennia of carnage that included the "clever" elimination
of our physically stronger Neanderthal cousins.
Today, human society still lauds the Alpha Male - who is nothing but
the most self-centred and ablest destroyer in the pack. They may look
as comical as Donald Trump or as glinty-eyed as Tony Blair, but they are simply examples of Darwinism at its
finest.
It is therefore unsurprising that we are where we are today,
presiding over a shit-on-our-own-doorstep environment that is really
tired of us and will respond in fitting manner in due course through
some form of natural correction.
All talk of changing our "civilisation" is redundant. Here's the rub (pun intended):
We can no
sooner try to change the way we are than a slug can try not to leave a
trail of slime.
The smart answer might be to pull the plug on ourselves, but I'm sure
the vast majority would rather remain exactly the way they are -
striving to amass worthless currency and silly possessions while the
tableau that is their home planet degrades until it reaches the point
when it must slough off most of us to cleanse itself.
Whichever way you look at it, we are all (as far as I know) part of the gene pool that achieved global "dominance" at the expense of a colossal proportion of the rest of the natural world. Think of us as the descendants of thieves and marauders who raped and pillaged and laid waste to everything in their path.
Americans and Britons in particular can grasp this point via a rudimentary awareness of their country's history, but on the larger scale all Homo so-called sapiens are party to the vicious millennia of carnage that included the "clever" elimination of our physically stronger Neanderthal cousins.
Today, human society still lauds the Alpha Male - who is nothing but the most self-centred and ablest destroyer in the pack. They may look as comical as Donald Trump or as glinty-eyed as Tony Blair, but they are simply examples of Darwinism at its finest.
It is therefore unsurprising that we are where we are today, presiding over a shit-on-our-own-doorstep environment that is really tired of us and will respond in fitting manner in due course through some form of natural correction.
All talk of changing our "civilisation" is redundant. Here's the rub (pun intended):
We can no sooner try to change the way we are than a slug can try not to leave a trail of slime.
The smart answer might be to pull the plug on ourselves, but I'm sure the vast majority would rather remain exactly the way they are - striving to amass worthless currency and silly possessions while the tableau that is their home planet degrades until it reaches the point when it must slough off most of us to cleanse itself.