Note: This content first appeared last week for subscribers at the Patreon page. If you’d like access to sneak peaks and exclusive content like this or just want to help support the work of educational liberation, please consider becoming a member for as little as $3 a month.
For three years the water supply of Flint, Michigan, a largely Black Working Class community in the economically shuttered Rust Belt, has been poisoned by its own state and managerial government. And yet, somehow, instead of deposing the governor and everyone else responsible for this fiasco, the main legislative body of this country declared it all a big mistake and, really, Who’s to Say Who’s to Blame? In breaking news, it’s been nearly a year to the day after American police and security forces hit peaceful Native Americans with water cannons, tear gas, and close-range rubber bullets in sub-freezing temperatures while destroying their tents for peacefully protesting oil pipelines. Their warnings came to bear last week when Keystone spilled 210 thousand gallons of oil near Native lands and water. None of the government leaders responsible for these crimes have been held under criminal charges nor even held responsible. Rick Snyder is still governor of Michigan. For all of this, we have not declared Michigan an enemy of the United States, nor the police of Morton County, North Dakota, or St. Louis County after twice declaring martial law on peaceful black protesters and their communities.
It’s quite remarkable that a country that poisons the water, land, and air of its own black, indigenous, and poor citizens is somehow the moral arbiter of human rights around the world.
A nation that will not guarantee work, let alone living standards, to its people has the right to tell governments that guarantee universal food, housing, healthcare, and clothing that they are immoral and should be dissolved? Something ain’t right.
A country that actively seeks to leave a third of its adult population without access to healthcare, while 9 million poor children are on the verge of losing their coverage, has little right to condemn other states for internal warfare. Thirty three million adults (10% of the entire US population, a much higher percentage if we only include adults under the Medicare entrance age of 65) completely lacked any form of health insurance for all of 2014. This also does not include those who have only partial insurance or only had it for part of the year. Republicans have been working overtime to double that number and no one in power has so much as threatened to lock them up or chop off their heads. But we know who the good people and the bad people are, I guess?
A state that has called for, justified, and committed Geneva Convention-defined torture against its own citizens and citizens of the world simply for their connection to being Muslim has the right to call other countries terrorist?[1] Nah, ma.
A nation that steals indigenous land while erasing, subjugating, and cartoonizing indigenous peoples to establish a White settler-colonialist capitalist system, that was built on Black slavery and upheld through exploiting African American and immigrant populations against each other can accuse socialist nations of racism? Even as Black and Brown people in socialist states face better prospects, less inequality, and better material conditions than they ever did under US imperialism. Even as US-backed governmental opposition and rebels are killing, starving, and selling black and brown communities.
The state most predicated on capitalist land accumulation, where families face homelessness on the regular as a result of skyrocketing housing and living costs, has the audacity to condemn countries that guarantee housing. The fact that forty percent of homeless people are aged 18 or under is a direct result of national, state, and local policies and practices that have erased virtually all rental and leasing protections while decimating public housing. Along with gentrification, this is a deliberate plan to maximize profits. Not content with these dirty capitalist deeds, they seek to complete the cycle. Throughout its municipalities, the United States targets through laws and architecture those experiencing homelessness until there is nowhere else left but literally on the streets or dead. This is genocide.
A democracy between two hyper-capitalist, imperialist parties run by rich people wherein millions of cases of voter suppression and rigging occur every year as tens of millions of adults are disenfranchised from the electoral process automatically deems elections in socialist countries to be a sham. The two political parties that nearly every elected official belongs to vary only by degrees of repression inside the capitalist paradigm. Here, even the most left-leaning major politician is still an imperialist capitalist, whereas there are at least representatives of capitalism in a socialist-leaning country such as Venezuela. Moreover, despite the presence and whistle-clean observations of international watchdogs reporting on the outcome, the country that does not bow to American hegemony must be headed by a dictatorship, despite frequent nation-wide elections and direct referendums, despite voter turnouts at rates much higher than in the US, where citizens can only vote for candidates who are more indebted to their financiers than the people they ostensibly represent. Despite the fact that everyone, not just the bourgeoisie, is encouraged to vote in, say, Venezuela while political parties find ways to wipe voters off the roles here. But the US runs a democracy, if we can call it that, thousands of steps removed from the people.
A country with astronomical wealth inequality, where the top 10% hold 51% of wealth and the next 90% hold 74% of the debt, has no moral authority to point fingers at societies that work to erase barriers to health and well-being. Not the country where 71% of the workers face such a high cost of living that they (including yours truly!) subsist from paycheck to paycheckand are thus unable to save even for emergencies that are covered in most developed and socialist countries.
The lone nuclear superpower in the world, with thousands of military bases and outposts throughout, seems to be the only country with a right to feel threatened. The most powerful empire in the history of the world, and oddly enough the strongest and richest, lets us know through its mouth-pieces that it has nothing but the best intentions. Military campaigns merely exist to spread democracy, freedom, and human rights, and the empire only enters into war as a last resort. Despite the fact that the United States hasn’t been attacked by another state on its own soil since Pearl Harbor and hasn’t suffered civilian deaths through a foreign power since, I don’t know, the War of 1812, we apparently have a preservational right to carry out several military campaigns a year, killing thousands of civilians per month. We are even threatening complete war against the DPRK (Democratic Party of Republic of Korea, aka, North Korea), which would ultimately end in the genocide of the Korean people, under the pretense that they are threatening our safety. But we are the ones demanding that they lose their self-defensive capabilities. The United States acts as if the DPRK , despite the fact that it was wewho waged a war against them, killing a full-fifth of their population with more bombing than we committed to in all of the Pacific theater of World War II.[2]
A nation that seeks economy-destroying sanctions to punish all smaller countries that do not fall in line with its capitalist colonialist agenda will blame those countries’ economic problems on incompetence. If you think you hear racial dog-whistling overtones, rest assured that your ears do not deceive you.
The state currently seeking to overthrow three or four other governments citing “civil rights violations” actively works to dismantle the body and material rights and the collective voice of its own people. In contrast, all of those countries punished by the US in terms of food blockades and economic disruption are the same ones providing free food and medical care to all of its citizens as much as possible. If it looks like the United States is starving its own people, it’s because it is. Food is a weapon.
Imagine going to a responsible major superpower with your horror stories under American racism and capitalism.
Imagine telling them about the racist mass incarceration and unchecked police brutality, about its contemporary slavery through the penal justice system.
Imagine testifying that a conservative estimate shows nearly one out of every 100 people is incarcerated (not including immigration detention centers); that those numbers are awfully skewered racially every step of the way;
about how it invades countries on false or baited pretexts;
how it sells its own citizens as capital;
about the fact that roughly 20% of the adult population is without health care;
that one out of every 30 children is homeless.
Imagine showing them evidence of what happens when your country oversees the regime changes of other countries, of the disappearances and helicopter rides, the extrajudicial trials and tortures, the puppet regimes, the false pretenses in the mainstream media, the chattelslave markets, the displacement of tens of millions, the vacuums that lead to open carnage and warlords, the assassinations of indigenous activists, the backing of war criminals.
Shouldn’t the international community rally against that nation? Maybe the United Nations should sanction it.
— — — — — — — — —
[1]On the plus side, it looks like the international community through the ICC is finally up to do something about these war crimes.
[2] From Time Magazine :
American aircraft dropped more bombs on North Korea between 1950 and 1953 than they did in the entire Pacific Theater of World War II — 635,000 tons vs. 503,000 tons. The destruction was so extensive, and so thorough, that bomber crews spent much of the war searching for targets.
American planes bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another,” said Dean Rusk, the State Department official in charge of east Asia at the time. A Soviet study later estimated that 85 percent of structures in the country were leveled. Some 32,000 tons of the bombs dropped were napalm, the jellied gasoline incendiary weapons that burst just above ground level and stick to human flesh.
“We . . . eventually burned down every town in North Korea,” Gen. Curtis LeMay, who headed the Strategic Air Command, later boasted to Air Force historians. “Over a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea, as direct casualties of war or from starvation and exposure?”
