18% Increase in Homelessness in USA? On Jimmy Carter. And North Korean Troops in Russia Again

 

This is acutally Toronto, not the USA. Because we're suffering under a capitalist oligarchy too.

While reading today's essay from Caitlin Johnstone, I saw that she referred to a news story that I'd read about a day or two ago.  

The US empire is up to its elbows in the middle east working frenetically to manipulate what happens there, while in the United States itself homelessness has taken another record-shattering leap forward. Homelessness in the US has increased by a staggering 18 percent since last year — and last year also saw a giant spike in homelessness of 12 percent from the year before. Officially there are now around 770,000 homeless Americans, though the real number is likely several times higher.

This massive injustice is entirely by design. As the hub of a globe-spanning empire, the US needs to keep its citizenry poor, divided, distracted and powerless in order to keep them from meddling in the gears of the imperial machine. The more free time and mental spaciousness Americans have, the more they’ll awaken to how depraved their government is and how badly it’s screwing them over. The managers of the western empire naturally have a vested interest in keeping Americans poor, sick, ignorant, and propagandized. Which is why they remain so.

But reading it in Johnstone's essay, it made me think about all the economists and Biden-Boobies who say that working people have really benefited from Biden's presidency and that the sentiment that things are terrible is some sort of sign of delusion n' confusion.

But homelessness cannot rise by 18%, and lifespans cannot shrink, and depression rates cannot soar, if people are doing well.  It's more likely that the statistics employed by liberal economists like Dean Baker or Paul Krugman are garbage.  Heavily manipulated, isolated factoids.  US-American capitalism, financialized and oligopolized, is cannibalizing its own economy to sustain its "growth."

It was the Great Depression that brought Hitler to power in 1930's Germany and it is decades of austerity and decline and insecurity that produced Trump. 

So, Jimmy Carter died.  As an adolescent at the time, I thought that Carter was a good president.  He didn't start any new wars.  He tried to negotiate the release of the US-American hostages at the US-American Embassy in Tehran.  He acknowledged the energy crisis.  In the 1990's, after reading Noam Chomsky, I learned that the reality was much different.  This essay: "Jimmy Carter: the False Savior" by Michael K. Smith outlines most of Carter's service to capitalism and imperialism.

His Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson’s Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request “inactive” status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews [Carter himself stated that housing should be segregated]. Energy coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed’s supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was “egocentric” to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail “the end of the human race.” Since it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who would.

In what William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (a study of the Federal Reserve Bank), called his most important appointment, Carter named Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Bank. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s assistant for domestic affairs said that, “Volcker was selected because he was the candidate of Wall Street.” The Wall Street agenda became clear when Volcker contracted the money supply and declared, “the standard of living of the average American has to decline.”

Wealth was funneled upward and wages and production declined. Unemployment and bankruptcy rose, unions shriveled and disappeared, Pentagon spending soared. For the first time ever American white collar families couldn’t save money. With urban housing costs zooming, workers fled to remote suburbs, but the increased commute expenses tended to cancel out cheaper mortgages. Moonlighting and overtime work increased, but added income disappeared in eating out, second commutes, and hired child care. As the cost of necessities outpaced wage gains, only credit cards could fill the widening gap. Hamburger stands and nursing homes proliferated while well-paid manufacturing jobs fled to the Third World. The workforce of the future was said to be a generation of superefficient robots.

Still and all, I honestly believe that in his post-presidency life, Carter became a genuinely moral man.  Personally I think it was Ronald Reagan's scandalous back-door agreement with the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until after the election, in return for weapons, that shocked Carter into just how amoral the US-American system was.  I think Carter was aware of his own negative contribution to the majority of Americans and that's why he spoke out against many of the USA's imperialists' crimes.

Lastly, my browser homepage continues to give me headlines about North Korean troops in Russia.  (As if that would constitute some heinous crime against humanity.)  I discussed this issue in my last post.  There was one about NATO's "plan" to "deal with" this alleged reality.  I thought about reading it but opted to play Candy Crush instead.  Then, they put another one in front of me later in the day and I decided to finally check out what the pro-NATO mainstream media is saying about this topic.

The Guardian says that South Korea's intelligence service have confirmed Ukrainian claims to have captured a North Korean soldier who subsequently died.  Holy shit.  So, one group of stooges for the US Empire has validated the claims of another stooge of the US Empire.  Apparently there are some photographs of a wounded East Asian man in military fatigues that the Ukrainians produced.  That's it.

Again, it is actually diplomatically unremarkable were North Koreans to be fighting inside Russia against Ukrainian invaders.  But Western audiences are to believe that Putin's Russia and Kim Jong-un's North Korea are particularly despicable countries and that their alliance was forged in Hell with Satan as a witness.  The fact that the USA is helping to genocide the Palestinians, and that they have used Ukrainian nazis as stooges to condemn 500,000 of their fellow countrymen to death so that Lindsey Graham can invest in rare-earth materials isn't supposed to intrude upon our moral indignation at the alleged participation of North Korean troops expelling Ukrainians from Kursk.

And, if it turns out that the whole goddamned thing is a fabrication, ... it won't matter.  The media/propaganda system is shameless and the general public has a very short memory.