by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Black Agenda Report
Wednesday, 05 March 2008
The dollar’s implosion and the global banking spiral demand that Americans contemplate what was previously unthinkable: the toppling of the United States from its 60-plus years of economic dominance. The very idea of a greatly reduced U.S. world role is alien to most Americans, who “won’t know what hit them when the hammer falls.” Conditioned by a media that owes allegiance only to corporate owners, never to the truth, and believing that the U.S. is a “light unto the nations,” much of the public find the looming economic meltdown inconceivable except in terms of “enemies” abroad. In a nation that increasingly produces nothing but weapons, “the response to the loss of domination will be more wars.” Lack of a real social safety net ensures that “economic upheaval will create crime, family disruption and untold psychic damage” as Americans’ most basic understandings of their country” are “shaken to the very core.”
Freedom Rider: Economic Meltdown
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
How will Americans react when their economy collapses? The story of the coming crisis is barely being told because the corporate media’s information bubble gets thicker by the day. Very few people know or understand the depths of the coming crisis. There is talk of recession, and falling home prices, but there has been little if any explanation of the havoc that will be played out across the country when the day of reckoning comes.
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Neither the corporate media nor politicians are telling the country the true extent of our economic troubles. The country will be wholly unprepared for the coming catastrophe. While foreigners are waiting for an opportune moment to drop the dollar like a bad habit, the presidential candidates say nothing and the people won’t know what hit them when the hammer falls.
The three trillion dollar cost of the Iraq occupation, and giveaways to corporate cronies have sucked the treasury dry. Bush will have won the day, and left the next president with no money for any new initiatives, regardless of any campaign promises.
What will be the human cost when the bottom falls out? Americans have no safety net, no job security, and no health insurance without the jobs they are about to lose. There will be wide spread human misery among the people less prepared than any other to cope with the crisis.
Dandelion Salad 