Particularly Good Today

It's Monday and that means a new blog post by James Kuntsler, one of my don't miss bloggers--along with Chris Hedges at "TruthDig," Charles Kingsley Michaelson III at "Some Assembly Required," and anything Matt Taibbi has out there. I just thought I'd share with you the way he starts today's blog entry:

The wonder is that more Americans are not ticked off about the state of our country than whatever is happening ten thousand miles away. For instance, how come the US Department of Justice is not as avid to prosecute the pervasive racketeering in the US economy as the State Department is for provoking unnecessary wars in foreign lands on the other side of the planet, over matters that have little bearing on life here? This racketeering, by the way, amounts to a war against American citizens.

     I’m speaking especially of the US military racket, the banking and finance rackets, the health care racket and the college loan racket, all of which have evolved insidiously and elegantly to swindle the public in order to support a claque of American oligarchs. In other civilized lands, health care and college are considered the highest priority public goods (i.e. responsibilities of government), and national resources are applied to support them under the theory that bankrupting people for an appendectomy or a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering is not in the public interest. In our land, that would be considered “socialism.” Instead, we “socialize” the costs of supporting Too Big To Fail banks — so their employees can drive Beemers to their Hamptons summer house parties — and a military machine that goes around the world wrecking one country after another to support a parasitical class of contractors, lobbyists, and bought-off politicians in their northern Virginia McMansions.

This is an angry guy, an intelligent guy, a guy who has been for years pointing out the folly of the Americans and their self-destructive madness. He's not holding out much hope for change, and he sees a violent revolution in this country when things reach the breaking point. The idea scares me to death, as it should anybody, but like the total destruction of the planet's ecology by global warming, it begins to assume an air of inevitability. I fear I know too much of the history of human beings on this earth to feel otherwise.