AMERICAN STUDIES

As this historical account proves, we have meddled shamelessly in practically every nation’s internal affairs for generations across the globe: from Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile and many other “lesser nations”, to Russia, Australia, and even Italy and Canada. No one is immune from Washington’s sordid maneuvers.

ALASTAIR CROOKE—The alternative way simply is to privatise these ‘public goods’ (as in the West), where they are provided at a financialized maximum cost – including interest rates, dividends, management fees, and corporate manipulations for financial gain.

‘It’ is then a truly different economic approach. To give one example: New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension cost $6 billion, or $2 billion per mile – the most expensive urban mass transit ever built. The average cost of underground subway lines outside the U.S. is $350 million a mile, or a sixth of New York’s cost.

How does this ‘it’ change everything? Well, just imagine for a moment: the biggest element in anyone’s budget today is housing at 40%, which simply reflects high house prices, based on a debt-fuelled market. Instead, imagine that proportion at 10% (as in China). Suppose too, you have low-cost public education. Well then, you are rid of education-led debt, and its interest cost. Suppose you have public healthcare, and low priced transport infrastructure. Then you would have the capacity to spend – It becomes a low-cost economy, and consequently it would grow.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The US-centralized empire is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates and brandishing armageddon weapons at its enemies like a drunken hillbilly with a shotgun, and people are still like “Something must be done about China’s intellectual property theft!”

Among the violent and destructive governments in our world, one towers high above all the others in a league entirely of its own. Add in the malign behavior of its allies, who effectively function as arms of the same single empire on foreign policy, and the gap between it and the next-worst offender grows even greater. And yet, somehow, many people act as though this power structure should not face a unique level of criticism and scrutiny.

JOHN RACHEL—There are sites in Nevada devoted to storing the toxic byproducts of nuclear fission. For example, Yucca Mountain was being prepared as a massive depository for life-threatening waste. It’s time to reinstate funding for this project and get it ready for a new form of toxic sludge. It’s huge, far from anything or anyone else, just waiting to be put to good use. 

Perfect, I say!

The perpetrators of our oppression deserve their own truly “private space”.

We deserve to be free from their pathological obsessions and devious manipulations.

It’s practically the definition of a win-win proposition!

We should spare no expense nor any speed. Lock them down now! Let them take it all with them. Ship their yachts and private jets, their stores of wealth in every transportable form, send it all packing, dump it all in those spacious Yucca Mountain caves.

All image captions, pull quotes, appendices, etc. by the editors not the…