GORDON DUFF: WHY AMERICANS ARE EXPORTING THEMSELVES

IT MAY BE THE LAND OF THE “24 HOUR WALMART” BUT IS IT STILL AMERICA?

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Americans are terrible at languages.  I have one friend whose English is questionable, you know who you are, but who speaks Japanese.  Another, Mark Siljander, speaks 11 languages.  I can be misunderstood in several, even, perhaps especially English.  So, when Americans chose to live overseas, it is often a huge inconvenience.  It isn’t just language.  Americans give up cheap gas, OK, not that cheap anymore, cheap food and conveniences found almost no place else, give them up but are still leaving in droves.  Places like Panama and Costa Rica are becoming unaffordable, so many Americans are either moving there, or for the money crowd, investing in vacation real estate there.  Prices are going through the roof.

Military retirees have always blended in “elsewhere” very well.  I am part of the retiree community in Germany, trading off cheap wine and beer for few public bathrooms, expensive food and impossible shopping.  In return I get safer, not perfectly safe anymore, no, immigration from Eastern Europe has brought plenty of crime to Germany, streets, better drivers and feeling of community that has all but disappeared from America.  Divided America. 

There is real economic pressure on America and we don’t handle it very well.  We turn on each other like rabid dogs.  We lie.  Mostly we lie.  I am still reading about how we don’t have enough nurses and teachers.  The articles flood newpapers, magazines, not only in the US but we advertise this around the world.  Remember, this is a country that is, as are many, in the throes of an “anti-immigration” tirade.

Well, the truth is, nurses are being laid off across the country and so are teachers.  We have tens of thousands of unemployed nurses and more, an uncounted army of unemployed teachers.  Yet we lie about it.  Why?  The same old reasons come to mind.  Nursing wages have been flat for decades, pushed down because of of overseas recruiting while graduates of American universities, Registered Nurses, are working at McDonalds and Walmart.  Why would anyone want to leave a country with liars like these?  I wonder.

Americans are sick of lying but few know how far it has really gone.  Wikileaks, a media manipulation maneuver in itself, did have some positive fallout.  It was one of the few times the media admitted, albeit accidentally, that they have gotten it wrong consistently.  Another blunder by the media was last weeks UPI article on me by editor Arnaud de Borchgrave.  In pointing out my accusations of Israeli complicity in 9/11, accusations I see as evidence based, accusations that UPI termed as “disinformation,” they accidentally, for the first time mentioned the controversy over Israel’s possible role in 9/11.

Until that article, not only had evidence gone unreported but even mentioning the possibility was taboo.  Was this an “accident” by veteran journalist de Borchgrave or maybe a way of saying, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”

Being misinformed, chronically, by a press that is one of the least “free” in the world isn’t the only problem.  American’s perceptions of their own country, their own people and especially, their own government has declined dramatically.  We can’t say it started during the Clinton years but they are worth looking at.  There was no war, gasoline averaged $1.45 a gallon, half what it is today and our well over $2 trillion dollar a year deficit was a surplus.  With Bush administration officials concerned about extradition for war crimes and their British counterparts subjected to a two year criminal enquiry, the idea of attempting to impeach a president over a sexual relationship sounds insane today.

With the collapse of neo-conservatism brought on by Bush-Cheney disasters, attempts to build a consensus of fear and anger to replace the thinly veiled socialism of Reagan “supply side” economics has led to levels of rhetoric that make most Americans uncomfortable with their citizenship.  “Suppy side” means someone takes your money away, be it government or those who own government.  It is still “socialism” no matter how you package it.

Extremist groups financed by oil, financial and defense money and backed by the AIPAC lobby have declared a “psy-op” campaign against America.  The attack is multi-faceted and draws on primal fears based on race.  Though the Tea Party talks constitution, the reality is all racism.  Never has any organization had so much financial backing but no visible backers.  The real evidence isn’t in their incomprehensible policies, fear mongering, xenophobia and class hatred.  The evidence is in their unwillingness to approach any problem of substance, a “movement” entirely built on subterfuge and misdirection.  To them, the wars don’t exist nor do the real threats to the constitution that the endless “terror” based bureaucracies represent.  Millions of Americans now arm themselves, expecting their door to be kicked down by Homeland Security, not illegal aliens.

Problem is, what is feared most, a government out of control, insane with power, got that way through manipulating the fear of those now being told that government is the problem.

Problem is, the same groups that profited from building the “bureaucracy of fear” are now organizing the anti-government movement.

Stupid is as stupid does.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that those behind the anti-government movement are exactly the same people who started the wars and, oh lest we forget, were at watch during the “ever so mysterious” failings that led to 9/11.

Americans, even those that don’t “get it” openly feel something is wrong.  This is what drives so many to leave and so many more to talk about little else.  When Americans hear about war with Iran, more and more are waiting for a new 9/11.  It worked once, why not try it again.  America gave up her freedoms, her way of life, her standard of living and her future to an international cabal that knows it could use the media to blame some schmuck in a cave somewhere for a rainy day if they wanted to.

After a decade at war, what does a terrorist attack matter anyway?  It’s just pictures on TV.  You can turn it off and watch sports.  None of it is real anymore.  This was the idea all along, make people powerless, make them untrusting of government, even untrusting of the media.

The frightened, the frustrated, the powerless will vote away their freedoms, their jobs and even the lives of their children.  This time, the “conservatives,” the name the power elite give themselves to seem less threatening, have thrown themselves under a bus on purpose.  After all, with Americans so malleable as Bibi Netanyahu puts it, any group, no matter how jaded and debauched, can simply reinvent itself.  Banksters and war mongers are now Tea Party independents with the Fox News cheerleaders of the failed totalitarians of the past seamlessly helping repackage Fascism.

Maybe emptying America was the idea all along, making the country so unlivable that some alien race could settle here.  Is there another explanation for taking something so great, so wonderful as the United States and destroying it? 

When they leave, they never come back.  Most of those I know who have left are veterans, many military retirees.  There are chunks of America in two dozen countries, not just Germany or Ireland or Costa Rica.  American communities are springing up in France, Spain, Italy and even Switzerland, for those who can afford it.  Americans, increasingly, just want to be left alone.  It is almost impossible to talk to anyone in America about anything other than sports for more than five minutes without having to take part in an attack on either Jews, African Americans or Muslims. 

Hate may be profitable, it certainly helps keep the level of national ”stupid” where needed.  It has certainly provided Israel with decades of cover to the extent that our trillion dollar a year defense budget should, in its entirety, be listed as aid to Israel.

Hate, however, is unhealthy to live around as is the fear used to stimulate it.  If you want to leave America, dream of some peaceful village, perhaps out of a movie, where the American dollar provides that maid, gardener and mistress, you have fallen into the trap.  With millions giving up on America, withdrawing into television, learning to look away, oblivious to war, injustice and poverty, the cruelties now seen as inconvenience, the “psy-ops” campaign has taken hold.

I hear from one of my good friends in the Philippines often.  I always ask the weather, especially when it is snowing in Ohio.  It is always the same, “When are you coming here….you can stay with me until you find a place of your own.”  The language is English.  The cost of living less than a third.  All the terrorists live on one island, Mindanao, and you can visit them whenever you wish.  Maybe 200,000 Americans live there, possibly more. 

In the Philippines, being continually angry is looked on as abnormal.  In America, it is the defining characteristic of the “post 9/11″ era.  Worse than anger is powerlessness and fear.  This is the real infection, spread by television and the internet, by newspapers and talk shows and, especially, talk radio.  It now defines much of religious life in America, fear, anger and hate.

A hundred billion dollars has been spent to define the causes of Islamic extremism.  The answers are always the same, poverty and hopelessness.  The programs and policies enacted by those who commissioned a hundred billion dollars, spent to help secure America from threats from abroad have worked overtime to bring poverty and hopelessness to America.  As predicted, what has been sewn has reaped a bounty of extremism from within. 

Was this done so we all would simply pack up and go?

Related Posts:

• Sons of the Fallen from Iraq and Afghanistan
• Muslim Christian Jew, Extremism is Extremism
• Prosthetic’s for Peace. The costs of Land Mines and War.
• America and Pakistan – Questions and Answers
• Double Vendetta

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