US Border Patrol collects millions of tracking data points about American motorists in order to form profiles of their travels. Those deemed suspicious are targeted for pretextual stops by local law enforcement in one of the most Orwellian developments of our age. Jack Kerouac would not have approved.
Given the logic of sanctions, it’s unsurprising that they hardly ever prove effective. A large country like the U.S. imposes economic misery on a country’s inhabitants in the hope that they, rather than hate the U.S., will blame their own government and then overthrow it, thus doing what the U.S. wants.
Presidents of both parties have assassinated thousands of innocent people all around the world with drones. The latest iteration of these extrajudicial killings is Trump’s campaign against so-called narco-terrorists in the southern Caribbean, who are carrying cocaine to Africa and Europe, not the United States. But the incident that attracted criticism and investigations was the DOD’s decision to kill a pair of survivors of one such strike off the coast of Venezuela.
Politicians and political parties that smear and lie about others find themselves in a dilemma that begins with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much electoral punishment for lying.
With ACA subsidies expiring and neither party serious about creating a real medical insurance system, healthcare is becoming as much of a luxury status purchase as a Rolex or a Rolls-Royce.
The United States has used drones to assassinate political opponents overseas all around the world, including, most recently, alleged drug traffickers from Venezuela in the southern Caribbean.We get away with it now because we are a superpower. But what if, as will almost certainly happen someday, the situation is reversed?
A century ago, workingmen often returned to their long-suffering wives to confess that they’d blown their entire paychecks on demon rum. Now that good organic food is so extravagantly expensive — not to mention groceries in general — spending everything on booze seems like the responsible choice.
Republican leaders casually admit they undemocratically wield power by acting illegally and ensuring any court challenges come too late, while deliberately keeping voters in the dark through the collapse of the media and information suppression.
The U.S. Department of Defense has assassinated at least 87 Venezuelan nationals, alleging that they were drug traffickers, by blowing up their vessels on the high seas. In one incident, two out of eleven crew members survived the initial attack. Forty-one minutes later, U.S. forces decided to kill the survivors. The Trump administration claimed that, even though the two men were in the middle of the ocean clinging to debris and not even wearing shirts, they still posed a threat to the United States and its national security interests.
As we’ve seen in other examples of mass disruption, there’s a general assumption by employers who fire workers en masse to replace them with automation that somehow it’ll all work out because someone else will hire the discarded workers. In a consumer-based economy, this is a dangerous assumption.
Ted Rall’s Latest Books:
