An All-American Nightmare: This is what defeat looks like

[sad sally]

You can, of course, say many times over that the U.S. remains, as it does, an immensely wealthy and powerful country; that it has the wherewithal to right itself and deal with the disasters of these last years, which it also undoubtedly does. But take a glance at Washington, Wall Street, and the coming 2012 elections, and tell me with a straight face that that will happen. Not likely.

If you go on a march with the folks from Occupy Wall Street, you’ll hear the young chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” It’s infectious. But here’s another chant, hardly less appropriate, if distinctly grimmer: “This is what defeat looks like!” Admittedly, it’s not as rhythmic, but it’s something that the spreading Occupy Wall Street movement, and the un- and underemployed, and those whose houses are foreclosed or “underwater,” and the millions of kids getting a subprime education and graduating, on average, more than $25,000 in hock, and the increasing numbers of poor are coming to feel in their bones, even if they haven’t put a name to it yet.

And events in the Greater Middle East played no small role in that. Think of it this way: if de-industrialization and financialization have, over the last decades, hollowed out the United States, so has the American way of war. It’s the usually ignored third part of the triad. When our wars finally fully come home, there’s no telling what the scope of this imperial defeat will prove to be like.
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We’re now, it seems, in a new era in which reality is making us. Many Americans -- witness the Occupy Wall Street movement -- are attempting to adjust, to imagine other ways of living in the world. Defeat has a bad rep, but sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered.

read more at:http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/39458/an-all-american-nightmare-this-is-what-defeat-looks-like?du

[0rganism]

1. i liked the first comment/reply

"Dude, that devastation was the dream... The war was supposed to bankrupt us - that was one of its points. That was a feature, not a bug."
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/39458/an-all-american-nightmare-this-is-what-defeat-looks-like#comment-258849

Right on, Roddy. The day most of the American people figure it out is the day OWS stops pitching tents and starts building guillotines.

[Xipe Totec]

2. At first, I said OMG, Wall of words....

But then I kept on reading, and reading, and reading...

There it is, all of it, in brutal black and white.

Excellent article. Thanks for posting.

[Lint Head]

3. It's called The Shock Doctrine. Gut and perform an economical lobotomy and rebuild in your image.

It's a financial god complex and the financial overlords responsible for the devastation that has happened and will come need to go down.