Episode Transcript
It is February 3, 2023, East Palestine, Ohio, the weather is a mix of sun and clouds, the people are well wrapped up against the seasonally cold temperatures.
Something is about to happen that they have no protection against.
A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals is going to be derailed, jeopardizing the community’s safety and sense of normalcy.
Equally importantly, the train crash is going to expose exactly how America works.
U.S. President Joe Biden calls the toxic derailment which sparked a health and environmental crisis, and forced residents to abandon their homes, completely preventable during a visit to the area a year after the incident.
"While there are acts of God, this was an act of greed that was 100% preventable," he declaims. Pleading innocence and powerlessness like some modern Pontius Pilate, he adds, "We were pushing railroads to take more precautions, to deal with braking, to deal with a whole range of things that were not dealt with. Norfolk Southern failed its responsibility."
Remember, this is purportedly the most powerful man in the world who can support a proxy war that will kill millions in Ukraine and enable a genocide in Gaza but he cannot legislate laws that protect ordinary American people.
You see the pattern here.
This is the two-rule world in America. One rule for the elite including corporations who are usually able to get away with anything, and another rule for the general populace, who are the most neglected, brain-washed, surveilled group of people in the Western world.
As expected, the crash has led to ongoing litigation in which money will be the main focus of settlement while steps that should be in place for things like this not to ever happen are stuck in limbo.
Like, The Railway Safety Act of 2023, a bipartisan bill is introduced in the U.S. Senate. Its key provisions include:
Requiring two-person crews on most trains.
Setting new safety standards for tank cars and hot bearing detectors.
Increasing fines for safety violations.
Enhancing HAZMAT training for first responders.
The bill has faced significant lobbying opposition from the railroad industry and has not yet been voted into law. It represents the most direct potential legislative response, and so will never see the light of day, or will see it in a watered-down form that will ensure it is ineffective.
This is the American way because it is a country in which only money matters.
While economic inequality may be an inherent facet of the human experience, its scale, spread and impact is the result of the decisions made by a society and those who control the system, namely, its elite.
Therefore, its impact can extend inequality into areas of society which we all accept can only work properly if they are applied equally to all citizens.
This can then reinforce and deepen other inequalities.
The law is one and perhaps the most important single element, with democracy its kissing cousin, in the equation in countries like America.
As we have already noted in previous part of Excluded, inequitable law in America is a tool of choice for the elite to exercise power by giving it a veneer of legitimacy.
Democracy is another.
In 2005, at the apex of the mortgage-backed securities bull run, Citibank published 'The Plutonomy Symposium' report for the eyes only of its wealthy clients.
It outlined their belief that the American economy had morphed into a plutonomy, that is, an economy driven by or that disproportionately benefits wealthy people.
If anything, this process has gathered pace in the post-2008 America where successive Quantitative Easing (money printing by the Federal Reserve) and tax cuts for the wealthy has ensured that increasingly not only the levers of the economy, but the economy itself, has been privatised.
Citibank posited that, "our whole plutonomy thesis is based on the idea that the rich will keep getting richer," as long as "the rest us" could be kept in the dark about its existence, its role, and its over-arching control.
One of the leading banks in a country that claims to be 'the world's greatest democracy' was revealingly not warning its wealthy clients that their economic capture was putting even the appearance of democracy in peril, but rather democracy, if it became truly representative, would put their wealth grab at risk.
So, how did a country that was apparently founded on such high aspirations and sold that dream to millions has become, and revealed itself to be, the reverse of everything that it has claimed for itself?
The answer is simple.
It never was, or has been, what it claimed for itself.
It has always been an exercise in smoke and mirrors and those in charge of the smoke and mirrors conjure up not only their version of reality for those watching but also pocket all the rewards while the eyes of those watching are diverted from the real world.
America's wealth and power is based on a particularly selfish, extreme and rapacious form of colonial capitalism that began with the ideas inherent in America's founding and developed industrially in the Nineteenth Century.
It has no boundaries; moral, social or environmental.
Therefore, it is anti-human.
Neoliberalism is colonialism with a new name for the hegemon, the aim to re-impose it on the whole world has always been the endgame.
The frameworks to help it happen had already been created and been in place; a military and institutions that can be used to justify, support and enforce it.
Once America started to expand its network of power and control internationally, the American elite followed their successful domestic template of creating a framework of institutions as a front to support, extend and reinforce its aims of global dominance while appearing to work for the greater good.
Thus, it helped establish, and largely paid for, institutions like the UN, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) which has been at the forefront of imposing neoliberal policies globally, Chile as one example, World Health Organisation, OPCW and many others to provide the outward legitimacy for its self-interested actions worldwide and keep would-be challengers in check.
Where this was not enough, America has had its own secret group of men and women to enforce its hidden foreign, economic policy, dictated by, and implemented for, the corporatocracy which characteristically only benefits a tiny minority of people to the detriment of the majority around the world.
Two examples over a century apart, illustrate how this has worked and continues to work even today.
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." Major General Smedley Darlington Butler wrote in his seminal book, 'War is a Racket' (1935).
Butler was, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. And the man the alleged plotters of the 1934 coup against Roosevelt had chosen to be their front man. They had known the work he had done for them in the past but they did not know the real man.
That, you will argue, is so Twentieth Century. It doesn’t happen now. Well, let John Perkins tell you differently.
"(American) Economic Hit Men are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder," John Perkins has written in his book, 'The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman: How America Really Took Over the World' (2016).
He should know.
Posing as an economist for a Boston consulting firm, he was one of them.
Today's Iraq, after the toppling of Saddam Hussein illustrates what he means and also how the process continues.
And it's not just about oil.
It is about subverting the world to America's interests, and that means, its economic model.
NGOs, Thinktanks, Institutes (often labelled 'for democracy') are key actors in this strategy, both at home and abroad.
Creative Associates International (CAI) is one of the largest and most powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating anywhere in the world.
It was given over $500m for projects in Iraq and Afghanistan alone by the U.S. government and has been at the forefront of remodelling Iraqi society as a radical free-market, neoliberal experiment, like Chile nearly fifty years ago.
This involves demolishing the public sector and shifting control of civil society nearly completely to the private sector.
The handing a nation over to corporations is an attempt to make Iraq into a mirror of America.
This model is being implemented internationally using the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) framework where violence cannot be the tool of choice.
One court case is filed per week, usually in American courts but in many European courts too because they are part of the same system.
Originally set up to provide a mechanism for settling disputes by arbitration (outside of the courts) if corporations wanted to challenge government decisions affecting their investments, today it is being used by corporations to not only sue for compensation for alleged expropriation of land and factories, but also over a huge range of government measures, including environmental and social regulations, which they say infringe on their rights.
Moreover, multinationals have sued not only to recover money they have already invested, but also for alleged lost profits and "expected future profits."
The fundamental question this poses is whether a foreign corporation can, or should be allowed to, force a government to change its laws to please the corporation.
Those who challenge corporate actions, like Steven Donziger did with Chevron in Ecuador, find that American law and American courts, work for the corporations and supersede the laws of the countries where the acts occurred.
This effectively makes American corporations unaccountable.
This is the logical end of the American corporate model being forced onto the wider world, where every government is in service to corporate needs rather than the needs of its people.
A world where a corporation, formed to benefit the few, can sue governments elected to represent and ostensibly work for the people in some of the poorest countries for hundreds of million dollars, for its own, singular benefit.
It is institutionalised racketeering on a global scale.
Meanwhile, the breakdown of Iraqi society is obvious with lack of basic utilities like water and electricity commonplace. Mass demonstrations widespread. Loss of faith in the imposed, political system, complete.
This was once a secular country with the highest educated populace in the Middle East under Saddam Hussein.
Afghanistan is by far and away the country where Creative Associates' projects secured the most funding, particularly with regard to their education system.
Projects included building schools, writing and printing textbooks, training teachers, administering and managing education systems.
Creative Associates schoolbooks in Afghanistan purged any mention of the past few decades of Afghan history including the Taliban from its textbooks.
That very same non-existent Taliban is now back in power.
It is estimated that 40% of the 'aid' money earmarked for Iraq and Afghanistan never even left the United States, going direct towards management and consultancy fees for the prime contractors.
The vast majority of the $2.3tn ($300m every day over twenty years) the US government spent for the war in Afghanistan did not go to Afghans, corrupt or otherwise, but to US military contractors, NGOs, Thinktanks and those who bought US debt.
A reported 80-90% ($240-$270m each day) of US outlays ended up back in the USA as a massive wealth transfer from taxpayers to firms in the military industrial complex who have seen their profits and stock prices skyrocket.
It is estimated that only 2% of all monies expended actually reached and affected the lives of ordinary Afghan people.
How some of this money was spent ostensibly by a democracy, but one where the elite are unaccountable, is barely credible.
Matthew Hoh, a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps, had never seen anything like it and he used an apt analogy, "I was living like Scarface… I had at one point… $24 million on hand, in $100 bills, sitting in safes in my bedroom… It was up to me … literally. I am not joking. No guidance and no requirement to provide documentation about where that money went."
Those Americans conditioned to expect nothing, 'it's not the government's job to help you,' they're told, like the families camping out overnight in the Pennsylvania rain so they can get free dental care from mobile charities, the millions using food banks just so they have enough to eat, the sixty thousand homeless in Los Angeles despite many having full time jobs, the forty million without any healthcare, the 1 in 5 of all children growing up in poverty, should ask their country's political elite in the 'world's greatest democracy' what they are doing for them while they splurge taxpayer money overseas and into the pockets of their chosen beneficiaries in bound-to-fail missions.
It is imperial corruption on an unimaginable scale.
As many organisations, like the UN, have evolved to reflect a multi-polar world more recently and begun to stop behaving like America's support system all the time, American elite have either walked away or undermined them for doing what they were ostensibly set up to do.
Attempts at new, global agreements on myriad areas including climate change represented by the various Accords have been treated with contempt, or pallid support, in line with American thinking that the rules that apply to the rest of the world do not apply to it. Even though we live on the same planet.
America's reluctance to fully embrace the existential challenge posed by the impending climate change is understandable.
Its global hegemony has been built on control of fossil fuels and the financial system underlying them. It is also now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world.
58% of all money invested globally in the coal industry, approximately $1.3tn, is American as of 2021.
It is also said that the U.S. military with its global footprint is the greatest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
To mitigate the importance of fossil fuels and the financial system, control the military-industrial complex, would substantially lessen its power, influence, wealth and require a new way of thinking about America as a society at home and as a country in the wider world.
However, it is worse than that.
Attempt has been made to geo-politicise climate change as a weapon against economies of China and India to slow or derail them because they could threaten American hegemony.
This is the present. What do you think the American future holds?
Let us know.
