The financial scandal that emanated from Wall Street and which continues to embroil the whole world received, for better or worse, genuine, if panicked, attempts to intervene and prevent complete economic degeneration and catastrophe, something which could still happen, and may even be likely. One could argue whether some of the same predatory crocodiles who caused the problem should have been put in charge of à ‚¬Ëœfixing' it, but that's recent history now. The point is that the self-inflicted threat to the world economy was at least taken semi-seriously.
More abstract and less conspicuous than the financial abyss into which America may still be heading, is an even worse danger, worse because it is what inspired and allowed the former: America's political and moral degeneracy. It is the greatest evil, because it permits and enables all that follows. And on this front there seems to be no equivalent of the financial fixers, panicked as they may have been, or the equivalent of the trillions of dollars dumped into the system to try to avert disaster. Obama fiddles as America burns.
America is experiencing an unprecedented moral disaster that is by far Mr. Obama's greatest challenge, of which he seems oblivious. Money is important, but so is the rule of law, and that is based on ethics. Ignore that, and governance eventually becomes impossible. Chaos ensues. Violent anarchy prevails. And not only empires crumble, but nations fracture also. At huge cost in human suffering.
America smugly calls itself a (mostly) Christian nation even as it wages imperialistic invasions that are illegal by all human standards, international or domestic. It tortures people, even innocent people, even children, even to death and upwards of sixty percent of its citizens find no fault. The ex-Vice President, whose Administration destroyed evidence and then moved mountains to block and then strangle a proper investigation of 9/11, points to the latter as a justification for more torture, more illegal kidnapping, more murder. More military. More war. More madness. No apologies, just that permanent self-satisfied sneer. Contempt.
With more than a million dead in Iraq and millions more maimed and displaced, Americans, to the limited extent they think about it at all, wrap themselves in the red, white and blue illusion that they are spreading freedom and democracy, not terrorism and random death on a massive scale. Torture. Murder. Madness. Not a dream. American nightmare.
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