As Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out,
the US, unlike some countries, is not an ethnic group. It is a collection of diverse peoples united under the Constitution. However, when the Constitution was essentially destroyed by the recent Bush administration, the US in some important ways ceased to exist. What exists today are power centers that are unaccountable. Elections mean nothing, as both parties are dependent on the same powerful interest groups for campaign funds. The most powerful interest groups are the military/security/industrial complex, which includes the Pentagon, the CIA, and the corporations that service them, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the oil industry that is destroying the Gulf of Mexico, Wall Street (investment banks and hedge funds), the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the agri-companies that produce food of questionable content.
These corporate powers comprise an oligarchy that cannot be dislodged by voting alone. Ever since "globalism" was enacted into law, the Democrats have been dependent on the same corporate sources of income as the Republicans, because globalism destroyed the labor unions. Consequently, there is no meaningful difference between the Republicans and Democrats.
The "war on terror" completed the constitutional/legal failure of the US. The US has also failed economically. Under Wall Street pressure for short-term profits, US corporations have moved offshore their production for US consumer markets. The result has been to move US GDP and millions of well-paid US jobs to countries such as China and India, where labor and professional expertise are cheap. This practice has been going on since about 1990.
After 20 years of off-shoring US production, which destroyed American jobs as well as the federal, state and local tax base, the US unemployment rate, as measured by US government methodology in 1980, is over 20 percent. The ladders of upward mobility have been dismantled. Millions of young Americans with university degrees are employed as waitresses and bartenders. Foreign students comprise an ever larger percentage of the enrollment at US universities as the American population finds that a university degree has been greatly reduced in value by the off-shoring of the jobs that graduates would have ordinarily taken.
Millions of Americans will never work again, and why should they? Permanent unemployment is now all but assured by Congress, and many home owners are asking themselves, "Why take two low-paying part-time jobs (the only kind that areavailable to a growing number of Americans) when even with the jobs, I will be unable to pay my mortgage without being poverty stricken in other ways? Why not instead stop paying the mortgage and live rent free for a couple of years?"
Why should people keep paying on underwater mortgages on depreciating houses worth half what they were bought for? All their neighbors are living for 1-2 years for free before walking away, laughing at the fools who keep paying. Why not do the same?
CNBC shills never quit luring the brain-deads to their doom with constant happy talk, "There will be no depression -- Ben Bernanke won't allow it!," and "Buy stocks for the long term." The truth about banks hiding a trillion dollars in mortgage and loan losses is never mentioned.
"Outsourcing is good for America," Wall Street oligarchs screamed, and now, because of it, millions will never work again. "We have a great new service economy and we need illegals who work cheap!" And now they will not leave, and why should they? Free everything, and they are helping to bankrupt nearly every state.
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