America’s Implosion: Who Done It?

If these times were the plot line of a movie and not a global catastrophe, the entire audience would be on the edge of their seats, desperate to learn not only how it ends, but “who did it.”  Take the implosion of the United States, where the most powerful country in Earth has become a bunch of greedy, cruel, racist, science-denying, criminal thugs.  The decline of moral standards has been so precipitous that it’s hard to believe that it didn’t have a cause.

So, who did this? Let’s look at some candidates:

• The mainstream media, driven by profits, thus covering whoever has the biggest mouth and commits the most outrageous, ratings-boosting acts

• Corporate greed, driving a decline in everything from the quality of our food to the safety of the products we use

• The pharmaceutical industry, selling harmful and addictive drugs

• The Libertarians, e.g., the Koch brothers, the oil companies, etc., dismantling the public sector–destroying everything from education to environmental protection

• The Russians, focusing on destroying the U.S., helping get Trump elected in 2016, and trying again in 2020

• The religious extremists (as suggested above), aggressively removing science from policy-making

In fairness, it really could be that what we’re experiencing is simply what necessarily happens at the end of unfettered capitalism.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer; that’s nothing new.  But it’s possible that once a threshold is crossed and the rich effectively control the government, things rapidly spin out of control, as everyone else is in such bad shape vis-a-vis education, health, access to truth, and financial pressure from underemployment what once was a democracy crosses over into the kleptocracy/oligarchy that we see before us today.

At that point, we can expect more blatant authoritarianism, the end of rule of law, more disinformation campaigns, even worse education, environmental collapse, and rapidly run-away pandemics as many have no access to healthcare and those who are insured overwhelm our hospital systems.  The rich behave even more atrociously and now act with complete indifference to human suffering. Any moral compass that may have at one time existed for the common American goes out the window, as desperation grows and the rich commit increasingly brazen white-collar crimes with complete impunity.  The notion of sustainability becomes meaningless because the population is so desperate for its own survival that it couldn’t care less about the quality of life afforded to future generations.

At the same time, China is as stable as a rock.  They’ve been at this for 6000 years, and are now poised for ultimate control as the end of the American Empire continues to self-annihilate.