TOM ENGELHARDT: The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine / Ioan Grillo: US-made guns are ripping Central America apart and driving migration

By Dilip -

On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell weaponry, domestically and internationally, in an unmatched fashion. You’ll undoubtedly be shocked, shocked to learn that the top five arms makers on the planet -  Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics - are all located in the United States.

Put another way, we’re a killer nation, a mass-murder machine, slaughter central. And as we’ve known since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there could be far worse to come. After all, in the overheated dreams of both those weapons makers and Pentagon planners, slaughter-to-be has long been imagined on a planetary scale, right down to the latest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) being created by Northrop Grumman at the cost of at least $100 billion. Each of those future arms of ultimate destruction is slated to be “the length of a bowling lane” and the nuclear charge that it carries will be at least 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That missile will someday be capable of traveling 6,000 miles and killing hundreds of thousands of people each. (And the Air Force is planning to order 600 of them.)

By the end of this decade, that new ICBM is slated to join an unequaled American nuclear arsenal of - at this moment - 3,800 warheads. And with that in mind, let’s back up a moment. Before we head abroad or think more about weaponry fit to destroy the planet (or at least human life on it), let’s just start right here at home. After all, we live in a country whose citizens are armed to their all-too-labile fingertips with more guns of every advanced sort than might once have been imaginable. The figures are stunning. Even before the pandemic hit and gun purchases soared to record levels - about 23 million of them (a 64% increase over 2019 sales) - American civilians were reported to possess almost 400 million firearms. That adds up to about 40% of all such weaponry in the hands of civilians globally, or more than the next 25 countries combined…

https://tomdispatch.com/slaughter-central/

Ioan Grillo: US-made guns are ripping Central America apart and driving migration north 

Between 2007 and 2019, more than 179,000 firearms were captured in Mexico and five Central American countries and traced to gun shops and gun factories in the United States. Mexico’s foreign ministry believes this is the tip of the iceberg, and estimates that more than two million guns crossed the Rio Grande over the last decade.

The weapons originate in the legal US gun market – the biggest in the world by far, with 393 million firearms in civilian hands, according to the last count. They then cross into a parallel black market through four main methods: a private sale loophole; straw buyers (people with clean records paid to buy guns); theft from gun shops; and the sale of parts to make un-serialized weapons, or “ghost guns”…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/16/us-made-guns-central-america-migration

Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)

Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

DANIEL LEWIS - Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94 // Catonsville 9 Statement written by Dan Berrigan, S.J.

Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion

Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy

Sam Kriss: 'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality

Zack Stanton: Violent Christian Extremism in the USA

John Pilger - The silent military coup that took over Washington

Bernie Sanders: Joe Biden must put an end to business as usual. Here's where to start // GOP nightmare about to come true: Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders

Paul Blumenthal: Trump’s MAGA Myth Reaches Its Catastrophic Conclusion / Schwarzenegger compares Capitol riot to Kristallnacht / Bharat Bhushan: Vigilantism threatens India too

Amulya Ganguli - End of India’s “Howdy, Modi” Bonhomie with the USA

Donald Trump's gift to America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG

Steve Bannon Documentary, 'The Brink', Will Leave You Cold

Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise

You're fired ! Americans taunt Trump with his own catchphrase

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths

Tom McTague: The Decline of the American World

Donald Trump: Democracy’s mirror image? By Philip Manow / David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?

Jonathan Freedland - Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart

Debt: The first five thousand years. By DAVID GRAEBER

HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home

Jill Lepore  A History of America’s military spending




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