Debt Rattle July 6 2019

 

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    Pablo Picasso Sleeper with shutters 1936   • Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims (Maté) • As You Celebrate Your Freedo
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 6 2019]

    #48411
    John Day
    Participant

    http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/hollow-empire.html
    Denial is America’s national pastime, but real patriotism requires honesty​, Helen (of DesTroy) Buyniski​
    As its economic fortunes began to decline in the latter half of the 20th century, the US government threw its considerable weight behind keeping up appearances, prioritizing maintaining the facade of a prosperous nation ahead of fixing the problems keeping prosperity at bay. Disciples of Milton Friedman’s neoliberal economics convinced the government that their only hope was to keep cutting taxes on the rich and hope they would eventually trickle a little down on everyone else. Admitting that this system had failed would betray weakness that would surely be leveraged into a full-fledged communist takeover. As a result, Americans have become shockingly adept at lying to themselves…
    America’s once-mighty military-industrial complex, the best-funded sector of the economy, with more money flowing in than the next nine countries’ military budgets combined, is in such a sad state the government increasingly has to bully allies into buying its substandard product…
    The Pentagon was recently reminded of just how dire the situation has become when China hinted that it could bring the US economy to a screeching halt by holding onto its rare earth minerals. While the US developed the rare-earth magnets currently used in nearly every item of high-tech military equipment and consumer electronics, the Pentagon is now 100 percent reliant on China for 20 minerals needed to make everything from fighter jets to cell phones to batteries and computer chips.
    This is no accident – Chinese investors were able to use the mechanisms of Wall Street to take control of the US’ rare earth industry and ship it overseas – and it doesn’t help that US banks have bent over backward to help in this not-so-hostile takeover…
    Even Silicon Valley, once the last hope for a nation that no longer builds anything, has been quietly offshored, shipped off to Israel over the past decade thanks in large part to hedge funder Paul Singer, who has worked hand in hand with PM Benjamin Netanyahu through his Start-Up Nation Central initiative, described as “a foreign ministry for Israel’s tech industry,” to make Big Tech an offer it can’t refuse. Rolling out the red carpet to multinationals like Amazon and Microsoft, populating their ranks with bright young alumni of the IDF’s Unit 8200 (often compared to the American NSA) and tempting them with a buffet of ripe-for-acquisition innovation-rich startups, Netanyahu has freely admitted he has a “very deliberate policy” to make Israel boycott-proof by making it the center of the Big Tech universe…
    Intel’s announcement earlier this year that it would invest $11 billion in yet another Israeli factory was followed by hundreds of stateside layoffs; the company cut 12,000 US jobs in 2016, and last year plowed $5 billion into another Israeli factory. Intel is cleaning up, with hefty subsidies from both US and Israeli governments – but only one country is getting a return on its investment…
    It’s no wonder Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are quietly packing up and leaving, too. Nice work, if you can get it…
    What does the US have left? The media, which should be sounding the alarm over the increasingly desperate looting of the nation, is instead a microcosm of the same catastrophe. Best exemplified by the grotesque pageantry of CNN – a network which purports to be a private company but is forced to pad its commercial breaks with ads for defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon…
    …If we really love America, it’s time to take an honest look at what needs to be fixed.
    https://www.rt.com/op-ed/463411-patriotic-honesty-denial-economy/

    The Military, Big Bankers and Big Oil Are Not In Climate Denial, They Are in Control and Plan to Keep It That Way​.
    ​ “Capitalism, militarism and imperialism are disastrously intertwined with the fossil fuel economy….A globalized economy predicated on growth at any social or environmental costs, carbon dependent international trade, the limitless extraction of natural resources, and a view of citizens as nothing more than consumers cannot be the basis…for tackling climate change….Little wonder then that the elites have nothing to offer beyond continued militarisation and trust in techno-fixes.”​ …
    ​ To maintain power they need to limit our thinking. The two most important narratives imposed on us are climate change as a “threat to national security” and as a “business opportunity” — the twin rationales for military and corporate power. They want to focus us on how to manage the crisis, profit from it, or adapt to it, instead of opposing it.​..
    ​ In truth, the military is caught in a crisis of its own making. As Desiree Hellegers puts it: “The US Military Poses a Significant Threat to the US Military.”[2]​…
    ​ ​So how is it that the bankrollers of climate chaos, investing $1.9 trillion in fossil fuels just since the Paris Accords, also claim to “manage and mitigate these climate-related risks?”​
    ​ ​According to the bankers, the problem with climate change is that it’s “posing significant risks to the prosperity and growth of the global economy.” What they will not say is that the global economy — which demands enormous fossil fuel production and consumption — is posing significant risks to the climate. The global shipping and aviation on which peak profit-making depends is, like the military, exempt from the Paris Accords.​..
    ​ What the bankers will not say is that billions of the dollars they trade in are “petrodollars” — as explained in this informative documentary video. A 40-year back-room deal with the Saudis secretly recycled oil money back to the US. This deal essentially shifted the US dollar from the “gold standard” to the “oil standard.”​ …
    ​ ​Buying oil in dollars is a form of imperial tribute other countries pay to the US — which is why the US insists all oil trading be in US currency. Iraq and Lybia once traded oil in other currencies. Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia and China still do. See?
    ​ Since oil props up the US Dollar, bankers have a direct interest in wars that prop up the fossil-fuel regime.​..
    ​ ​ ​“We cannot expect politicians to do what only mass movements can do…from below and to the left.” Truth. But how?

    Doubling Down: The Military, Big Bankers and Big Oil Are Not In Climate Denial, They Are in Control and Plan to Keep It That Way.

    #48414
    zerosum
    Participant

    Okay, so now that we are aware of what is happening, we are still not able to change the trajectory
    Yellow vests …. yellow hats ….. umbrella

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