Every chance President Obama gets he busily boasts about America’s “exceptionalism,” as if to convince himself of its truth by simply repeating the same lie over and over again. His speech a month ago at West Point was one big “I/we are so great!” Even the West Point cadets sat in subdued silence and bewilderment. Obama’s foreign policy speech convinced no one of America’s grand world leadership but only made a bigger fool of the US president than ever before.
Obama is still feebly trying to capitalize on America’s past glory, merely resting on its laurels and onetime greatness. Americans have traditionally embraced the notion that they are special and exceptional as the most well endowed, gifted nation on earth. After all, the US was the only superpower left on the planet after the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago. Indeed over the last century Americans have been proudly raised to believe that their nation is the richest on earth, possesses the world’s most powerful military fighting machine, and sentimentally, nostalgically and historically has always fashioned itself as the land of the free, a land of milk and honey with unlimited opportunity and freedom, and always considered the best country in the world to live in.
But that was then and this is now. Now America’s milk is contaminated with Monsanto fed toxins and the bees are fast disappearing due to Monsanto’s fed flowers. After waking up from its patriotic pipedream that at this point in time amounts to no more than wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur, Americans today are nervously realizing that the United States is far from what it has been cracked up to be. In fact, its ever-widening, very glaring cracks in such falsely smug notions as exceptionalism, shameless self-promotion and near invincibility belie the cold hard reality that now casts a long and dark foreboding shadow over the once great land. America today is not the greatest nation on earth and it turns out Americans are not nearly so exceptional as Obama would have us believe.
America is dead last in both healthcare and health and well-being of its people in a study that compares the US with ten other developed nations that include Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. As the only developed nation without some form of universal healthcare, Americans spend two to three up to ten times more on various healthcare services than all other nations. We spend $2.3 trillion annually on healthcare, about 18 percent of our Gross Domestic Product and way more than twice as much as other advanced countries.
The Health at a Glance 2013 report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the US lifespan that was 41 years ago ahead of the developed world’s average longevity by a full year now is more than a full year shorter than the average lifespan, rising from 70.9 to 78.7 while the rest of the developed nations rose from 70 to 80.1 years. People live longer than Americans in 25 other nations including all of Western Europe along with Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada. Among developed nations, in 2009 an estimated total of nearly 50 million Americans were unable to even afford healthcare insurance despite the so called Affordable Healthcare Act.
Still another study found the alarming result that the third leading cause of death amongst Americans behind heart disease and cancer is from medical malpractice. The study showed that between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer from preventable harm that contributes to their death.
All these statistics empirically prove that both the quality of US healthcare and the state of Americans’ health are far from the best in the world, unlike many Americans may typically believe. Rampant greed and corruption characterize our broken healthcare system that has pharmaceutical corporations, the largest health insurance companies and the largest medical trade organization (the American Medical Association) conspiring in unholy trinity to in fact keep Americans sick. Despite costing so much more, Americans are receiving relatively poor quality healthcare. The recent exposure of such horrendous corruption, malfeasance and incompetence involving the US government’s only socialized healthcare system with the Veterans Administration is an illustrative example of US healthcare going from bad to sinking to even worse depths.
Though the US may boast that its military force is far superior and still the strongest on the planet, reality shows that the US military loses every war it has entered and started since Vietnam. With its 9/11 false flag, the so called war on terror was ushered in using nineteen box-cutting Middle Eastern terrorists as its patsies. For three billion dollars Al Qaeda as the US designated post-cold war enemy was nothing more than a convenient, made-in-the-USA fabrication by the likes of the CIA. This week it just came to light that in 2005 the CIA even went so far as to actually create an Osama bin Laden action doll to generate children’s support to ensure a next wave of brainwashed future US soldiers be willing to fight and die in its forever war on terror. Meanwhile, the real truth is that back in 2001 barely a handful of US created al Qaeda terrorists even existed on this planet. Yet by calculated oligarch design, due to the disastrous US war and drone policies throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, so called al Qaeda terrorists are now more in control over world territory than ever before in history, the sad and pathetic irony being the very places where US has waged costly wars for years to ostensibly remove al Qaeda – the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. Also by design, al Qaeda has become the US outsourcing machine as its hired mercenary fighters wherever and whenever the US does not want to place GI boots on the ground, fighting US proxy wars in Libya, Syria and now spreading through Iraq.
The cold hard fact is the US government created the war on terror and the al Qaeda enemy from the beginning. Since the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s. the US has been bankrolling, training, and arming al Qaeda to do its Empire bidding against Russians in Afghanistan right up through the demise of the Soviet Union. Then throughout the 1990’s the US continued to secretly funnel US tax dollars to al Qaeda engaging in ethnic cleansing in the Balkans fighting against Serbians in Kosovo, Bosnia and the former Yugoslavian Republic that America purposely broke up and destroyed. Then of course Osama and his bin Laden family came in handy once again as the so called 9/11 “mastermind” to create the false flag “war on terror.”
Meanwhile, the true global terrorists have been America’s lethal killing machine, afflicting deaths up to 3 million Southeast Asians over the near decade long Vietnam debacle, another half million Iraqis killed during its decade long occupation and war, along with another half million deformed babies from internationally banned US Monsanto’s agent orange chemical warfare rained down on humans in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and still thousands upon thousands more recently born babies with deformities in Iraq from two wars in back-to-back decades with depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Additionally cancer rates are eighteen times higher than they should be in Iraq.
And now the bloodthirsty chicken hawks like Senator McCain and war criminal ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair are demanding yet even more death and destruction on the pulverized failed state of Iraq. Yet for all its brute power, the US military interventions around the world have only resulted in one humiliating US defeat after another in every counterinsurgency war America has ever fought.
Look today at the horrible waste lands created in every nation the US invaded and occupied for decades in both Iraq and Afghanistan. After draining an anemic US economy by squandering over six trillion US tax dollars and still counting, all America has to show for itself are two devastating military war defeats and nearly 7000 dead Americans lost in the two longest running wars in US history. Additionally, the tragic countless loss of life that the US government has criminally inflicted on both the Iraq and Afghanistan people is but a shameful and permanent scar on humanity.
Yet like Vietnam, the weak and corrupt governments the US installs inevitably are overtaken by stronger militant forces. The Islamic al Qaeda-affiliated extremists currently moving across Iraq that the US created and backed to destroy Syria, after realizing the Assad government forces were gaining the upper hand there, with US complicity turned its sights southward toward Iraq. In recent weeks they have swept down from Syria into Iraq with a vengeance, fast gaining ground of the entire countryside surrounding the capital Baghdad in an ultimate Sunni-Shiite confrontation that the US in fact orchestrated. Similarly in Afghanistan more land has been under the so called Taliban enemy’s control than the US trained and backed national government forces and will most likely be the next disaster to fall when the US installed government in Kabul is overpowered.
No, America is not what it once was. The US government perhaps at onetime may have been the so called good guy of the world, a global force for good as the propaganda recruitment commercials for the US Navy still falsely tout, but after single handedly creating the most armed and dangerous planet in the history of humankind, with so much global bloodshed, death and destruction, by any stretch of the imagination America can no longer be seen as the good guy to the rest of the world. And nor should it by Americans themselves.
The overstretched US Empire has purposely reeked havoc around the globe, and is now undergoing countdown to implosion from its rotting moral decay from within. The signs are everywhere, not just from the US international agenda of destabilization, destruction and impoverishment of every Third World nation and people on earth. Nor from the most obvious signs so visible from the ultra-transparency of Empire power grabbing when predatory central banks swoop in and impose loans impossible to repay that pave the way toward further exploitation through slave labor and transnational privatization of every underground precious metal and fossil fuel resource available.
Signs of America’s moral decay from within are blatantly unavoidable to even the most casual observer with any number of un-sustainable negative developments and processes rapidly unfolding. Aside from its military, the foundation of American power has been the US economy and power of the US dollar as the driving international monetary currency. For many decades every nation in the world that trades with every other nation must use the US dollar as its form of currency in all financial transactions.
For the longest time the central banking cabal represented in America by the privatized misnomer of the Federal Reserve Board has answered the global recession by simply continuing to print up more fake fiat dollars. With so many Euro nations right now in a deepening severe economic crisis – Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece especially, a number of nations around the world are now actively seeking alternative options to prepare in advance as a last ditch effort to cushion themselves from the impending collapse of the US dollar as the international currency. Thus nations like Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have recently formed the BRICS alliance comprising 40% of the world population, 25% of the global land area and from 20% of the total world 2001 GDP to a mere ten years later up to 30% of the global GDP. With leaders Russia and China now pushing to drop the US dollar, it appears more and more nations may follow their lead. In direct response to the global threat that US-NATO militarization has pushed, Russia and China just made a $400 billion dollar pipeline deal that will definitely not be paid for in US dollars. Russia and even the longstanding EU American ally Turkey are both seeking trade with Iran using gold, not the US dollar.
As the rest of the world opts out of the standard US buck for its trade currency, America will lose its power both internationally as well as domestically by an economic collapse believed to be far worse than the 2008 bubble that caused the Great Recession but expected to surpass even the Great Depression of the early 1930’s with skyrocketing inflation and panic in the streets. Without real assets to back up all their paper money trail, the six largest banks will belly up as their wild speculative misadventures in derivatives of at least $710 trillion will come crashing down. When creditors like China and Japan come demanding repayment for buying up US bonds for so many years and the US government mired in a fatal deficit cannot even hope to repay ($4,977,056,760,907 as of 6/20/14), the US will be driven into national bankruptcy.
Far from the banksters’ “too big to fail” bailout, many assume the financial crisis of 2008 has been safely resolved. Far from it, total world government debt since 2008 has increased by 40% while
the evil banksters that were too big to fail have actually grown by 37%. And with ever-louder war drums beating in every region of the world, numerous economic doomsayers have long been predicting and warning that the US in particular will plunge into a dark age of economic disparity along with traumatizing rippling effects felt throughout the world. The only guaranteed financial survivors of all this doom and gloom will be the globalist oligarchs and their malevolently fixed system based on indentured debtor serfdom ($12,552,888,712,133 the current debt held by American public as of 6/20/14). They have been plotting this New World Dis-Order for centuries, having successfully engineered so much calculated global theft, calamity and destruction.
With the overextended US military plundering accompanied by simultaneous global economic plundering and meltdown, other tall tale signs of institutionalized decay from within comes from the oligarch puppets that currently inhabit the halls of corporatized Washington DC, the European Union and NATO. Through billionaire funded political campaigns in the US, the transnational corporations with such entities as American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) quietly behind the scenes have been writing the laws that both numerous state and federal legislators are simply signing off on. Beginning with the 9/11 coup that opened the floodgate to tyranny, a fascist run oligarchy has insidiously invaded and taken over the US government.
The notorious buying of political candidates by such infamous thieves as the multi-billionaire Koch brothers and George Soros, aided by the oligarchic decision-making of the US Supreme Court in 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that declared corporations have the same rights as individuals with the right to buy elections with unlimited funding, what empty shell of a republic America once was has in this last decade been rapidly beaten lifeless and dead now. Oligarchy is now fully in control and every day signs of the US government’s betrayal toward the American people are seen everywhere now. By design a thoroughly polarized, poisoned and corrupted two party political system has created the most dysfunctional, inept and dumbed down Congress in US history. The treasonous executive branch led by Obama has been the most vindictive, secretive and criminal presidential administration in US history, even surpassing the war crime regime of Bush and Cheney.
Every meticulously crafted effort at establishing effective checks and balances within the political system ingeniously written into the US Constitution by the Founding Fathers strove to minimize the chance of out of control federal government reigning tyranny and oppression on its American citizenry. Madison and Jefferson publicly warned against a large standing, overextended national army that wages permanent global war while banking cabals and corporations at home subversively undermine democracy to covertly establish an oligarchic form of government. They brilliantly foresaw the potential abuse of power by a tyrannical federal government producing an oppressive militarized police state at home. The Second Amendment giving citizens the right to bear arms was expressly included to help ensure that an abusive, overreaching federal government could be defended against. They also were careful to provide state autonomy to limit federal power.
Both the heroes of the US Revolutionary War and the hero of the Second World War envisioned the potential writing on the American wall, warning of the risk of a colonial empire rooted in imperialism overextending itself like the Roman Empire before it that would inevitably lead to conditions at home ripe for tyranny and oppression. President Eisenhower observed the menacing dark clouds gathering even during his presidency and in 1961 spoke of the threat that an unbridled growing military industrial complex would wield infringing on America’s liberty and freedom. Now in the more than half century since the uttering of his famous words of farewell to the American people, now we are painfully seeing all his reasons for alarm have come home to roost. With the ever-expanding, cancerous military security complex employing one in six Americans today, the federal government has betrayed the Constitution that treasonous traitors now in control were sworn to uphold. Owned by the oligarchs, these traitors no longer display even a pretense of loyalty to either the Constitution or the forsaken American people that elected them to power.
Currently there are three new trade agreements being negotiated – the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) of Asian, American and Australasian countries, the Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) of the US and EU, and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), a “coalition of the willing” that aims for the super-privatization of all services. All of these subversive “free trade” deals are designed to rewrite the global rules of economic engagement in a brazen yet desperate control grab to consolidate the power of Western global oligarchs to combat the rising competition from the East in Russia and China. The oligarchs are also fully aware of the growing backlash of nations mobilizing and aligning in solidarity against the ruthless, over-aggressive Western powers.
At the same time, the oligarchs are also fully aware that growing segments of both the US and European populations are now realizing that their oppressive national governments that are supposed to be representing them as sovereign citizens in fact represent the oligarchs as their masters. As a result, there is movement presently afoot to prepare the US government and national governments across continents for massive domestic civil unrest and civil breakdown. America and Europe are but one false flag away from martial law declaring war on its own citizens. With such defense contractors like Cheney’s old company Halliburton awarded multiple million dollar contracts in recent years to build and refurbish secret prisons across America, all those empty federal prison camps will not remain empty much longer.
With the UN Agenda 21 signed in Brazil by George Bush senior and 178 other nations back in 1992 looming ever-closer on the horizon, it along with unlawfully enacted executive orders and laws passed since 9/11 have granted Homeland Security, FEMA, the US military and the UN full authority to round up law-biding US citizens, confiscate all their personal homes and properties, and place them under arrest without due process, without charges in prisons for an unlimited, open-ended length of time as authorized by Obama and Supreme Court endorsed passage of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Like the hidden night raids in pre-war Nazi Germany, or for that matter over the last few decades in places like Central America and the Middle East, citizens in the United States of America will simply disappear without a trace, either imprisoned or murdered or both, no longer ever heard from again. Meanwhile, to reduce anticipated resistance and the capacity of Americans to defend themselves, Homeland Security-FEMA have been busily buying up bullets and survivalist foodstuffs as the federal government with the next false flag most likely plans to declare martial law and crackdown on all known activists, dissidents and dissenters who openly oppose the fascist rule of tyranny by their treasonous government that in the name of democracy stabbed its own citizens in the back, betraying their interests for those of the oligarchs that have bought, owned and controlled them.
Though it may be too late to heed the warnings of our great American visionaries the Founding Fathers or Eisenhower, it is not too late to inform our fellow citizens of this great impending peril that face us ahead. It is still not too late to align with likeminded compatriots in our cities, towns and communities across the nation to band together in committed solidarity to uphold our constitutional rights and openly challenge and oppose the evil of government tyranny and oppression.
If we can connect and form alliances with enough likeminded people to realize that the oppressive government and oligarchs are the true enemy of the people, we can call upon our fellow citizens who may unwittingly be enlisted to turn against fellow Americans and ordered to commit evil acts on behalf of the fascist police state. No real decent American would ever want to hurt or kill other Americans just as no compassionate human being would ever desire to kill another human being. If we can enlist the loyalty and support of those who in carrying out their potential orders to do us harm, seeking to allow them to see the real truth, that blindly following orders that constitute war crimes imprisoning and killing other human beings is clearly wrong, then perhaps the oppressors will not have an army to bear authority against those of us mindful humans who choose love over hate and life over death.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.
