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The two Red Giants of Centrally Planned economies, the UnSociableStatesofAmnesia and Red China.
One is ostensibly Communist, the other ostensibly Capitalist, but both are neither, or neither is either, but only one pretends it is what it isn't, making the stewards of the latter highly suspect. Because whereas combining the economic, political and military decision-making in the same hands has always been a well-known feature of Statist economies - communist and fascist alike - where individual rights cannot constrain central rule, in the USSA, such a combination is denied even as the Pentagon sits in the center of government as a revered, untouchable institutional feature of totalitarian rule. Even the Constitution of the United States, the very document that empowers the military, and to which they've sworn an oath to uphold and protect, is subjected to ridicule and scorn, but the Pentagon? Not on your life (literally).
Medicare and even Social Security are attacked by successive Republican administrations, time and again: Reagan/Bush, GW Bush, and now Pwesident Plump all have gone on record to castigate the SOCIALIST! (AARRRGGGGHHHHH! NO!!!!) programs of insurance, all wishing to cancel Your policies after you've paid into them your entire lives, yet nary a whisper is raised to ask why we are in, say, Afghanistan, as just one example of the blut und eisen grip of American Military Rule. Sure the current plump one in the Offal Office will whine occasionally that trillions have been spent, but never will he need address the fact that it was the Deep State that forced the Democrats' hands after the GOP time and again, one administration after the other, not only first embroiled us in one regime change after the other, but then sought to cut VA benefits for the very people they showboat during SOTUS speeches, after having referred to their traumatic brain injuries sustained from hyper-sonic missiles being dumped on our soldiers' heads as "mere headaches".
For weaponry systems, space, and nuclear deployments, which all claim a portion of every man and woman's labor, the USA spends trillions upon trillions, yet on the more exacting mission of spending to secure our competitive future, virtually nothing is spent. Instead yet another trillions of dollars gets poured into doing exactly the opposite: depletion of the energy resources necessary to drive future competitiveness which are instead simply squandered; and not even for short -term profits, which at least Reagan/Bush's Voodoo economics goosed, but for both short and long-term losses, as not only the oil companies, but the oils Services companies, are going bankrupt at an accelerating pace since the Trumplestiltskin keeps gaslighting the electorate with methane flares so bright you can see them from space, with methane venting so egregious it could light up an entire state's electric grid, with gas seeps so prevalent they burst into flames at the slightest spark like a kitchen stove whose electric pilot takes too long to ignite, the gas accumulation resulting in a PHOOOMPH of flame when it finally lights. For if there is one thing that all GOP candidates learned from the legacy of Ronald Reagan, it's that by the time the long-term consequences of your policies impinge on the lives of the electorate, you will be long gone, and only the short-term methamphetamine rush of the bubble-blown economic boom is remembered, as thought the bursting bubble from the inevitable bust were not baked into the future. Just as the meth addict must come down from his high, so must the economy, but when it does, they'll be long gone.
By which definition the State of China isn't communist, only its only political party is. Likewise, the USSA is only Capitalistic, not Capitalist. Its main means of production are all harnessed by the Central Planning Committee referred to as the Joint Chiefs of Stuff, housed in the Pentagon. The clown cum Ringmaster showboating for the press, guaranteeing them the ad revenues they feed on in a frenzy of red baiting, so they entertain us with President Plump's exploits while remaining silent on any of the myriad disasters that await us, thanks to our own hubris, in the future for which we have left ourselves completely unprepared (such as that most predictable of all events in a hyperbolic-capitalistic Nation: Recession).
The DOD controls the largest network of industrial enterprises in the world from a single center in the confines of the nations's Capitol, whence all R&D, to which all decision-making and all allocation of the share of the national product of labor has redounded. As Arundhati Roy so succinctly stated, in a Democracy, Power gravitates to the institution with the least accountability. And in the USSA, that institution is the one that isn't even held accountable for its own budget. This in a system that insists it is Capitalist, ie, in which accounting is the foundation, yet in which the institution that directs where the lions' share of the national output will be directed is exempt from having to provide any accounting for their many nefarious activities for which we, as citizens of the USSA, will be held accountable. That's the new meaning of representational democracy: The whirlwind the Pentagon sows the rest of us will reap, as the mayhem and destruction they create are supposedly at our behest.
As the urdeutsch Trumplestiltskin moves his Partie Tag to Modi's India, they appear as if they were vying for position as doppelgänger to Torquemada, Spain's first Grand Inquisitor, each of them an incarnation of greed, creatures so swept away by atavistic impulses that reason has lost its power to check them. Instead Vanity has become the glory of their conception of a Master Race, determined to use all the means of the modern State at their disposal to subject all others to their will.
Primitive barbarism using all the techniques of modern science.
Hence can a bio lab redesign a virus and release it onto a supine citizenry.
All because when the Red Menace the DOD represented the Soviet Union as personifying disappeared into the mists of history, the Pentagon demanded yet more funding, yet bigger arsenals, even larger Warships, and now a farcical "Space Force", in a never-ending boondoggle of "efforts" to fill the nonexistent:
Missile gap
Bomber gap
Anti-ballistic missile gap
Fighter plane gap
Megatonnage gap
Submarine gap
Survival gap
Strategy gap
Security gap
Baby Gap
... none of which exist except in the opposite direction: it is every other country that has a, you-name-it, gap with US arms ... arms that includes the R&D you and I are giving our silent assent to, on biological and chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, which one need have no invading Forces to discover on American soil. WMD is what we do. What we Love. What we go to work every day through long commutes and thankless regimens to give our all to. It is what all our universities do; wherein so much more is spent on the research necessary to develop the next batch of deadly weapons to let loose on the world, that it dwarfs the student debt we've saddled the youngsters who attend those universities with. Youngsters who never heard the fifties', sixties', or 1970's relentless stream of propaganda the US poured forth to justify such programs: it was always to counteract the Red Menace, to fight off those nasty commies who had such programs of their own, where they sat up late into the night devising ways to rob innocent Americans of their freedom.
All of that crashed to the ground with the collapse of the Reds when the lies of the AMG were exposed for what they were. But what didn't crash was the DOD's budget. As it turns out, Americans don't really mind being lied to. As long as the bombers built, the Warships launched, the countries invaded keep the economy humming, the Pentagon can tell us whatever it wants and we will obligingly pull the wool over our own eyes; that's one of the advantages of being sheep.
Free-trade'd solve all the problems of nations.
They figure that the Raw Deal cannot go on piling up public debt indefinitely; when you have to stop, there'll be a smash-up, and that'll be their chance. The very freedom we're so proud of is their assurance of success; we're made impotent by it, and can't imagine taking action against those who use their freedom to destroy ours.
Fried und freiheit für alle, das ist
Thus have millions of men and women and even children convinced themselves that they are superior to the rest of the world, and that it is their destiny to remake that world, and that anyone who opposes them is a scoundrel, a criminal, a fiend out of hell, or worse, a (shudder) Communist. Now those same people behave more like Communists than any communist I've ever actually had the misfortune of meeting.
Reducing wages while increasing the workload of all its workers and bidding its munitions men to build build build ... Overkill is our game, the Red Menace is our name. Birth control advocates are shut up and abortionists are forced out of business or threatened with annihilation by murderous Right to "Lifers".
Loyalität und Treuepflicht (Loyalty and duty of loyalty).
Even well-informed persons don't seem to understood the power of propaganda in this modern world. But when you've got hold of the press and the radio, the Reality TV and the Internet, you can tell people anything and be believed. You can brag of your capability, despite the heartbreak of bone spurs, to shoot an unarmed stranger dead on the street in public and have the crowds at your Partie Tags roar their approval. You can hole up with your hordes of secret service personnel in South Florida, that sunny place for shady characters. (kennst du das Land wo die citronen bluten?) A personal Berchtesgaden, where racking up enormous personal profit you intend to stick the taxpayer the bill for, while those same taxpayers turn up in droves to cheer you on. Feasting on filet mignon and truffles while they choke down kartoffelsuppe, a condition they happily succumb to because they find the slogan "Spuds for Studs" catchy. But the (Leon Blum) is off the rose: One speech forward and two steps backward.
Neue ordnung: the Presidency has been replaced by the office of the Herr Reichskanzler: Reich Chancellor who "hat immer recht" (is always right). The current purges by our self-appointed Reichskanzler resembles nothing so much as the events in Germany after Rudolf Hess's flight to Scotland and his resulting arrest. Hess was an occultist and fascinated by Astrology, who had many astrologer friends, so the Gestapo arrested all known active astrologers as they believed his circle had influenced him and possibly conspired against him. Thus the Red listing of all federal employees who are loyal to their oath instead of to the Reichskanzler.
As for aesthetes, anyone who loves art and beauty, reason and fair play, and pleads for these things they get brushed aside. It isn't your world! It has no use for you! When the fighting starts, they'll be caught between the lies and mowed down.
Capitalism is War: Blut und Eisen: it even boasts about it, unabashedly; bragging that its creative destruction will mow down the world in order to set up the neue ordnung that doesn't necessarily include you; and what it calls peace is merely time to get ready for the next conflagration. Overkill is now a consummate skill. Carnage and destruction? Nun, geschäft ist geschäft und so weiter, nein? Just ask VW. Farfegnugen indeed. Especially when what you're driving is a tank ... or a Hummer.
The War Crimes Board of the Pentagon was originally set up to investigate crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit such crimes: now it is used to justify such crimes.
(More than a decade later, this same flusterwitz was used on the Burns and Allen sitcom. (@ 12:50 into the pgm) Gracie was on her way out of a psychiatrist's office holding a box wrapped in paper and tied up with string. When she explained why she was returning the cups that were contained therein, giving the reason as being the same as above, except in this case half of the cups were left-handed whereas what she had wanted were all right-handled cups, the psychiatrist ushered her back onto the couch).
Fracking is our left-handed tea set. It is what it is but what that is nobody knows, even as the entire economy has been leveraged on its short-lived "success", even as one company after the other goes bust, a result of the US pouring oil onto a market already poly unsaturated with it. Surreptitiously brought into being by the two Bushes with the underhanded help of Halliburton, Cheney and the DOD, it was an underhanded play (all the fracturing wells are referred to as "plays", relegating your entire future to a strategy of depletion as if it had no more consequence than a trivial ballgame) in an overheated game of Risk that allocated all the profits to the private sector while shuffling all the Risk into the public sphere.
This is the example of the sort of left-handed tea set democracy we are teaching the people of MENA when we leave it to the military and the profiteers. You can turn it anyway you want, it's not what it pretends to be. Both the military and the profiteers will end up just fine thank you very much, while we are left depleted because we never bothered to ask, "Why are we ousting dictators with the most barbaric methods possible only to set up a more polite American brand of the same thing?"
Oh that's right. Oil. But, of course, not for Oil. That's not how a Democratic nation operates. So the propaganda machine is called on and reaps yet another sub-contract to obfuscate, becloud, and confuse, with only the news they see fit to print enmeshing us in a web of half-truths and lies by omission.
But Red is not just Russia's favorite color, or only Red China's horde's hue, nor merely the shade Republican's have adopted as their own, it is the color of blood. As such it epitomizes the rivers of red that have flowed in the name of "Fried und Freiheit". But that "Peace" is Fried, rendered into nothing more than just another word for continual War, while the "Freedom" it refers to is the freiheit to crush the life out of whomsoever happens to be the enemy of the day. The Freedom of Overkill, the freiheit to impose nuclear blackmail on a non-nuclear world, a Dark Night of the Long Knives dimly lit, despite the deliberate combustion of everything dug up from under the ground, by the twin dead stars of imploded demagoguery; Red Giants warily circling each other in a perpetual embrace of doom.
