Capitalism + lies = mass death / America’s Second Civil War is Underway

By Dilip -
Trump’s attempted coup continues.... The Republican party’s biggest backers – such as billionaire Peter Thiel, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of big lie candidates JD Vance and Blake Masters – show no sign of reducing their backing in light of the committee’s findings. Big corporations continue to write fat checks to big lie candidates. In April alone (the last month for which data is available) Fortune 500 companies and trade organizations gave more than $1.4m to members of Congress who voted not to certify the election results, according to an analysis by the transparency group Accountable.US. AT&T led the pack, giving $95,000 to election objectors.

Money from corporations like Boeing, Koch Industries, Home Depot, FedEx, UPS and General Dynamics continues to flow to politicians who reject the 2020 election results based on the big lie, according to a tally kept by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as Crew...




The epidemic of gun violence in the US has become a commonplace reality. Easy access to firearms is an obstacle that national politicians have not been able to overcome with more than lip service. But gun violence is merely one ominous symptom of a growing social collapse that directly threatens our nearly 250-year old system of democratic capitalism. We begin with this: There have been 260 mass shootings so far this year, and 2022 is projected to hit an all-time record. Mass shootings, — four or more victims shot in a single incident — are becoming so frequent that we’ve become numb. Since the 1980s, the rate has increased 90 times – from 6 to 9 a year, to more than 900 projected for 2022. And while mass shootings occur all over the world, the United States is sadly exceptional; with only 5% of the world’s population, the US has 31% of its mass shooters...

Hedges: The Triumph of Death
The global ruling class is cementing into place a world where they govern without accountability, we are reduced to serfdom, the climate crisis accelerates, and mass death is normalized. The breakdown of the ecosystem is well documented. So is the refusal of the global ruling elite to pursue measures that might mitigate the devastation. We accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels, wallow in profligate consumption, including our consumption of livestock, and make new wars as if we are gripped by a Freudian death wish. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Conquest, War, Famine and Death – gallop into the 21rst century.

Those who rule, servants of corporations and the global billionaire class, accompany the suicidal folly by cementing into place corporate tyranny. The plan is not to reform. It is to perpetuate the corporate pillage. This pillage, more and more onerous for the global population, necessitates a new totalitarianism, one where the billionaire class lives in opulence, workers are serfs, rights such as privacy and due process are abolished, Big Brother watches us all the time, war is the chief business of the state, dissent is criminalized and those displaced by conflicts and climate breakdown are barred entry into the climate fortresses in the global north. Portions of the human species, the most privileged, will, in theory, hold out a little longer before they succumb to the great die off.

The persecuted and the abandoned, now in the tens of millions, know the future. For them, the future has already arrived. Julian Assange, the most important publisher of our generation, whose extradition to the US was approved on Friday by the British Home Secretary Priti Patel, is an example of what will befall all publishers and journalists that expose the inner workings of power. His imprisonment for revealing the war crimes, mendacity, cynicism, and corruption of the ruling class, including the Democratic Party, heralds a new era. Investigations into the centers of power, the life blood of journalism, will be a criminal offense....


Hedges: The Age of Self-Delusion


How With This Rage. BY CHRIS HEDGES (2005)


CHRIS HEDGES - The execution of Julian Assange: He exposed the crimes of empire; and that can't be tolerated


William Astore: The U.S. Military’s Lost Wars // Chris Hedges: The American Empire Will Collapse Within a Decade, Two at Most


Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide Machine


Jesus sermon from the Rev. Chris Hedges


Chris Hedges: Imploding the myth of Israel


Chris Hedges - Israel's big lie: This isn't self defense, it's a war crime, aided and abetted by the U.S.

 

Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges // "Borges and I"


Jorge Luis Borges - Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)


Kelly Denton-Borhaug: The True Costs of America’s All-Consuming War-Culture / Chris Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold


Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’


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