Society’s Collapse Has Already Begun, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer’s Newsletter, Mar. 10, 2023
March 20, 2023

American workers are stuck in a prison, a prison that they’re kept in through the perpetual threat of homelessness. This isn’t truly a rhetorical point, it’s an empirically proven reality. Nearly two-thirds of the country’s workers are now living paycheck to paycheck, meaning this last year’s inflation has made them easier to coerce. That’s the directly stated goal of the capitalist ruling class at this stage. A Bank of America memo from last year said decreased worker living standards will represent greater leverage for employers. The consequences of this are the destruction of these people’s mental and physical wellbeing. They’re being strained, abused, and exploited while having to choose between this and living on the streets.

American Capitalism’s Growing Dysfunction, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer’s Newsletter
February 21, 2023

The systemic breakdown that our socioeconomic system is creating has the potential to do more than worsen the suffering of the people. Capitalism has survived so long because it’s been able to exploit the crises it creates, to profit off of wars, depressions, pandemics, and environmental catastrophes. Yet in certain instances, these crises have instead produced victories for the working class. World War I made the Russian revolution possible, World War II made the Chinese revolution possible, the living standards crisis that the IMF engineered across the Global South made the formation of many anti-imperialist governments possible. When the capitalists disrupt society, they do so with the risk that the outcome will be not greater profits but an end to their rule.

Collapse Isn’t A Politically Neutral Thing, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer’s Newsletter, Oct. 31, 2022
November 2, 2022

When we analyze the collapse that our civilization is undergoing, we need to factor in the reality about collapse that our ruling class doesn’t want us to consider: collapse isn’t a politically neutral thing. It’s something that exists because capitalism has made the conditions for it possible.

The U.S. Empire’s War Against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea’s Newsletter
October 12, 2022

The unprecedented nuclear threat that humanity faces is a direct consequence of our society’s lack of access to the truths which outlets like Wikileaks have revealed about U.S. imperialism. These are the truths that Julian Assange, the political prisoner who’s now in danger of being extradited to the U.S. because of his facilitating these revelations, has used to come towards a deep analysis on the forces which shape our world.

The “American Experiment” Is Dying. What Will Replace It? by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea’s Newsletter, Sept. 18, 2022
September 19, 2022

The United States is considered the longest standing “democracy” by bourgeois thinkers because it’s never actually been a democracy, and has survived so long by undemocratically suppressing its proletariat. The jingoists who say it’s a republic and not a democracy are at least being honest about the nature of the social order they support. The USA was designed to be a modern version of Rome, an empire that only represented the interests of those who most directly benefit from the violence against the oppressed nations. Those being the rich, and the social base that’s bribed to align with the interests of the rich.

This Is What It Looks Like When An Empire Cannibalizes Itself, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea’s Newsletter, June 30, 2022
July 2, 2022

In front of us, something is unfolding that we don’t want to properly see, but that we subconsciously recognize. The warning signs for a fascist crackdown in America have been here for years, if not decades. It’s now that they’ve become too big for much of this country’s complacent left to ignore. We’re accelerating towards a level of direness which people living under fascism so often can’t perceive at first, until the reality of their situation has finished creeping up onto them. By George Jackson’s definition of fascism, which is when capitalism forcibly maintains itself through reform, we’ve already been living under fascism for generations. With the Supreme Court’s decision and its ramifications, this is becoming more visible to more people.

21st Century Fascism: The Bid For Survival By A Dying Capitalist Order, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea’s Newsletter
May 7, 2022

In the midst of the threat of Roe V. Wade being overturned, and abortion being automatically banned in 13 states within the next two months, the calls from liberals to vote come across as totally vapid. This is because over the last several decades, we’ve seen dozens of times what happens whenever Democrats become the dominant party: they fail both due to their own lack of principles, and due to the reactionary nature of America’s political structures. Because of this, the paradigm is pushed further towards fascism regardless of which party is in charge. In the present moment, where U.S. hegemony is in decline and capitalism is the most unstable it’s ever been, this dynamic is intensifying.

Assange’s Persecution and the Killing of Hope Throughout the West, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea’s Newsletter
February 3, 2022

This is a reblog of an article from last year.

The slow-motion execution that the U.S. empire is subjecting Julian Assange to, where Washington’s satellite state the U.K. is depriving him of the conditions necessary for a sound physical and mental state, is an external version of how the empire’s internal settler state creates political prisoners. Within the borders of the U.S. occupier regime, African liberation fighter Kevin Rashid Johnson and indigenous liberation fighter Leonard Peltier continue to be unjustly imprisoned. Should Assange be convicted, the empire will expand the arbitrary incarceration powers it exercises upon its internal subjects to a global scale, with the added effect of making war crimes journalism criminally prosecutable throughout this expanded range of tyranny.

The Growing U.S. Military and Intelligence Worries of Civil War, Part III, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Nov. 26, 2021
December 20, 2021

This is part three in a series on U.S. collapse and the potential for civil war. Read part one for how I think propaganda factors into this instability, and part two for the role that I think neoliberalism has.

Neoliberal Misery and Its Destabilizing Consequences, Part II, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Nov. 23, 2021
December 12, 2021

This article is Part Two in a series on American collapse and the potential for a U.S. civil war. Read part one for a detailed explanation of the ideas I’ll mention here about the U.S. empire’s internal cognitive warfare.

The imperialists are the architects of their own demise. Through reacting to the decline of U.S. hegemony by domestically applying Washington’s tactics abroad—highly militarized policing, exploitative policies, covert CIA propaganda, clampdowns on journalism, paramilitarism—the imperialists are ultimately accelerating this unraveling. This is because when these and other imperialist tactics are used abroad, they have the effect of making the places they target more unstable.

U.S. Doesn’t Fear “Foreign Meddling,” It Fears Internal Revolt, Part I, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Nov. 20, 2021
December 2, 2021

This article is Part One in a series I’m doing on American collapse, and on how this has the potential to lead to a civil war within U.S. borders.

The “imperial boomerang” effect—where the types of violence an empire commits abroad inevitably become directed at that empire’s own people—is caused by the fact that actions have consequences. When a country subjugates other peoples, this has repercussions for those within that country. A society built on exploitation and violence can’t last. Whether that society wants to face it or not, its greed comes at a cost.

Imperialism is the Source of our Society’s Growing Misery and Death, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Nov. 12, 2021
November 13, 2021

Collapse is a political phenomenon. It’s inextricably tied into the global class war, and into this war’s related factors of imperialism and colonialism. This is because the civilizational breakdowns that the world is experiencing, and that it’s on track to experience in the coming decades, are not natural occurrences; they’re the outcomes of capital’s designs. Therefore when we think about collapse, and about the survivalist steps we plan to take in response to it, we must frame things within a context of war. A war where the ruling class is engineering crises to preserve its own interests, and where these crises can in turn only be addressed by countering their maneuvers.

The New Bolivian Regime Change Attempt, and Its Terror Tactics, by Rainer Shea

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist
October 8, 2021

Two years ago, I underestimated the power of U.S. imperialism, to the consequence of having a nasty shock when I found out that Bolivia’s president had been forced to resign in a U.S.-orchestrated military coup. I had anticipated that Washington would carry out a regime change attempt in Bolivia for months prior to that day, but up until the coup actually happened, I remained under the illusion that Bolivia’s democracy would withstand the onslaught of white supremacist terrorism that Washington’s running dogs were unleashing upon the country after the 2019 election. U.S. hegemony was in decline; even the Pentagon had admitted this two years prior. For the imperialists to have victory at that moment felt counterintuitive, especially to my younger and more naive mind.

Coups, Censorship and Propaganda: The U.S. New Cold War Playbook, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist, Sept. 14, 2021
September 16, 2021

“Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader’s indignant passion as a member of the “West,” and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West’s, and especially America’s, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.” — Edward Said, 2001

Colonialism’s Final Form: Mercenaries and Weaponized Surveillance, by Rainer Shea

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by Rainer Shea
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Rainer Shea: Anti-Imperialist Journalist
August 4, 2021

The world that late-stage capitalism is creating is one where the only stable states—or things that resemble states—will be the fortified high-tech enclaves that the super-rich create in the wake of a collapsed civilization. In the scenarios that some futurists have been anticipating, by the end of this century the only places with reliable electricity are going to be the walled off communities of these elites, guarded by those seeking to be rewarded with food and housing and sustained by a neo-feudal network of farming.