The ABCs of Armageddon, America Britain and Canada, have
perfected the “conservative style of governing” created by the Chicago gang of
Milton Freidman called starving the beast and have brought it to its intended
outcome. That outcome is a sick, starving,
financially devastated populous serving an engorged ruling class.
Back in October of 2014, in an interview conducted by Truth-out’s
Michael Nevradakis with Henry Giroux called “Henry Giroux on the Rise of Neoliberalism” some very revealing observations were made regarding the
absolute global human devastation that has resulted.
Excerpt:
Henry Giroux: I think since the
1970s it's been the predominant ideology (neoliberalism), certainly in Western
Europe and North America. As is well known, it raised havoc in Latin America,
especially in Argentina and Chile and other states. It first gained momentum in
Chile as a result of the Chicago Boys. Milton Friedman and that group went down
there and basically used the Pinochet
regime as a type of petri dish to produce a whole series of policies….
We're talking about an ideology marked by the selling off of public
goods to private interests; the attack on social provisions; the rise of the corporate state organized
around privatization, free trade, and deregulation; the celebration of self
interests over social needs…
And I think the consequences of these policies across the globe have caused massive
suffering, misery, and the spread of a massive inequalities in wealth, power,
and income. These massive dislocations have also produced serious mental
health crises. We are witnessing a number of people who are committing suicide
because they have lost their pensions, jobs and dignity.
One segment of society that has suffered mightily and found
no relief for the resulting demons invading their psyche are the military
personnel who are sent to kill or be killed in the battlefield for world
domination.
I’m speaking of the military and their families that were
sent first to Afghanistan to kill goat herders in retaliation for the “9-11”
attacks on a deregulated financial center located in the World Trade Center,
then the expanded wars for profit in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, Egypt and
all across the world.
The brave, selfless citizen soldiers are discarded like
broken toys when the ruling class no longer makes a profit off them. Suicide rates are extremely high in the ABC’s
of Armageddon. For Example:
America
From CNN:
Every day, 22 veterans take their
own lives. That's a suicide every 65
minutes. As shocking as the number is, it may actually be higher….
Who wasn't counted?
People like Levi Derby, who hanged
himself in his grandfather's garage in Illinois on April 5, 2007. He was haunted, says his mother, Judy
Casper, by an Afghan child's death. He
had handed the girl a bottle of water, and when she came forward to take it,
she stepped on a land mine.
When Derby returned home, he locked
himself in a motel room for days. Casper saw a vacant stare in her son's eyes. A while later, Derby was called up for a
tour of Iraq. He didn't want to kill again. He went AWOL and finally agreed
to an "other than honorable" discharge…
Who else might not be counted?
A homeless person who has no one
who can vouch that he or she is a veteran, or others whose families don't want to
divulge a suicide because of the stigma associated with mental illness; they
may pressure a state coroner to not list the death as suicide
If a veteran intentionally crashes a car or dies of a drug overdose and
leaves no note, that death may not be counted as suicide.
An investigation by the Austin
American-Statesman newspaper last year revealed an alarmingly high percentage
of veterans who died in this manner in Texas, a state that did not send in data
for the VA report….
Nikkolas Lookabill had been home
about four months from Iraq when he was shot to death by police in Vancouver,
Washington, in September 2010. The prosecutor's office said Lookabill told
officers "he wanted them to shoot him." The case is one of many
considered "suicide by cop" and not counted in suicide data.
Carri Leigh Goodwin enlisted in the
Marine Corps in 2007. She said she was raped by a fellow Marine at Camp
Pendleton and eventually was forced out of the Corps with a personality
disorder diagnosis. She did not tell her family that she was raped or that she
had thought about suicide. She also did not tell them she was taking Zoloft, a
drug prescribed for anxiety.
Her father, Gary Noling, noticed
that Goodwin was drinking heavily when she returned home. Five days later, she
went drinking with her sister, who left her intoxicated in a parked car. The
Zoloft interacted with the alcohol, and she died in the back seat of the car.
Her blood alcohol content was six times the legal limit.
Britain
From BBC:
More British soldiers and veterans took
their own lives in 2012 than died fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan over
the same period….
Some of the
soldiers' families say the men did not get enough support. The Ministry of
Defence (MoD) said every suicide was a "tragedy"….
Seven serving soldiers have been confirmed
as having killed themselves last year, and inquests are pending for a further 14 deaths where suicide is
suspected.
The
British government, unlike its American counterpart, does not record the
suicide rate among ex-soldiers.
But Panorama has
independently established that at least 29 veterans took their own lives in
2012….
One serving
soldier who killed himself was L/Sgt Dan Collins, who had fought in Operation
Panther's Claw in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in the summer of 2009.
Deana Collins,
the mother of L/Sgt Collins, said her son was a "victim of war"…
L/Sgt Collins, a
Welsh Guardsman, twice survived being
shot and was blown off his feet by a roadside bomb….. His friend, L/Cpl
Dane Elson, was blown to pieces just yards away from him. … Collins's mother Deana had noticed a
difference in her son during his time in Afghanistan….
"The phone
calls changed and I remember him telling me, 'Mum, this place is hell on earth
and I just want to get out of here'," she said…. After 10 months of intermittent treatment,
the Army told L/Sgt Collins he had recovered and would soon be ready to return
to duty… Over the next three months, he
twice tried to kill himself…
He recorded a
farewell video on his phone and then hanged himself. He was 29.
Canada:
From CBC:
The recent deaths of two Canadian soldiers
who fought in Afghanistan have renewed
public debate about how to deal with military suicides. But veterans
advocates say that the data collected by the Canadian Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Canada on how many active
and retired army personnel have committed suicide is incomplete, and
makes it difficult to help soldiers who may be suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD).
Canada’s
Department of National Defence (DND) has confirmed that two soldiers died in
the past week. Corporal Alain Lacasse,
43, of Valcartier, Que., was found dead in his home on March 17. Police said it
was a suicide.
Master Cpl. Tyson
Washburn, 37, of Pembroke, Ont., was found dead on March 15. Officials aren't
releasing details about his death, but CBC News has learned Washburn appears to
have taken his own life….
There has been a
spate of soldier suicides in recent months, including three in the span of
three days in November.
Three more
soldiers died in January. On Jan. 3, Cpl. Adam Eckhardt, a native of Trenton,
Ont. who was based with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry at CFB
Suffield in Alberta, was found dead…
Alain Lacasse, 43, served six tours
of duty including two in Bosnia and one in Afghanistan. He was found dead
in his home in Valcartier, Que., on March 17. (Facebook)
On Jan. 8, Cpl.
Camilo Sanhueza-Martinez, a member of The Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment based
in Kingston, Ont., who had fought in Afghanistan, was found dead.
On Jan. 16,
Lt.-Col. Stephane Beauchemin, a 22-year veteran who had been deployed to Haiti and
Bosnia, died in Limoges, Ont, a small town east of Ottawa.
The deaths of
Master Cpl. Washburn and Cpl. Lacasse bring the number of confirmed suicides of
Canadian soldiers in 2014 to five.
The difficulty of
getting accurate numbers
The Canadian
Armed Forces (CAF) has published figures on soldier suicides up to and
including 2012. The numbers show there were 10 suicides in 2012, 21 in 2011 and
12 in 2010. Poulin says the figures
published by the CAF are incomplete…
The ABC’s of Armageddon have
nothing but disdain for the military lives that are lost and destroyed,
especially if they cut into their war profits.
As Henry Giroux stated in his interview in Truth-out:
We see the attack on the welfare state;
we see the privatization of public
services, the dismantling of the connection between private issues and
public problems, the selling off of
state functions, deregulations, an unchecked emphasis on self-interest, the
refusal to tax the rich, and really
the redistribution of wealth from the
middle and working classes to the ruling class, the elite class…
Dismantling of the welfare state
and privatization of public services and public assets are essential for
unending war for the ruling class of the ABC’s of Armageddon. They care not about the suffering their
trillion dollar wars cause across the world, because there’s gold in them thar
hills.
America:
From Global Research:
Excerpt:
Yahoo Money’ The
Daily Ticker quoting a Reuters
investigation that reveals that $8.5 trillion – that’s trillion with a “T” – in
taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never
been accounted for…
While Republican
politicians rush to slash food stamps
for the 47 million Americans living in poverty – the highest amount in nearly two decades – Republican U.S.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the audacity to complain that $20 billion
dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the massive and secretive $565.8 billion
Defense Department budget are “too steep, too deep, and too abrupt,” all while
the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing massive fraud, waste,
and abuse.
Britain:
From World Socialist Network:
Tales of “profligate” Greece, with its
population living beyond their means, have
long been central to the British and other European governments’ insistence on
austerity. “Take the medicine, or you will end up like Athens” is the
mantra.
Naturally, nothing is said of the criminal policies
of the ruling elite in Europe, involving huge bailouts to the banks that have reduced working people in Greece
to penury….
Described privately by some Conservatives
as a “moment of maximum pain,” Osborne set out measures that will plunge millions of workers and youth
further into economic insecurity and poverty.
Welfare cuts are intended to raise £34.9
billion… Working
age benefits, including tax credits introduced by Labour as a means of
subsidising low pay, are to be frozen,
reduced and/or phased out. The government pledged to slash the numbers eligible for one or another benefit from nine out of
ten people in 2010, to just half.
Tax credits and universal credits will
be restricted to the first two children
in a family. From April 2017, those with larger families will receive no extra
help.
Only last week, the government changed the measure through
which child poverty was calculated. This came after official figures revealed that 4.1 million children are in
“absolute poverty”, an increase of 500,000 children (or 14 percent) in the
lifetime of the coalition. Now, families with more than two children (12 percent
of the total) are to be hit harder still.
Canada:
From The Star:
Unions, teachers,
students and community groups have taken to the streets across Quebec this week
to protest expected public service cuts as a provincial budget is set to be
unveiled this spring.
A coalition of
community groups was formed to oppose the government’s austerity measures,
which they say will slash education,
health care, youth and other programs across the province….
In December,
Finance Minister Carlos Leitao said Quebec was on track to get rid of its
$2.35-billion deficit by 2015-16.
To do so, the province announced it would cut $700
million in public service jobs, $300 million in payments to municipalities and
$200 million to the health-care system, as well as raise some fees.
So the ABC’s of Armageddon are
slashing a swath across every democratic institution vital to the health,
safety and wellbeing of their people in order to fund a war based economy. And as Henry Giroux put it in the Truth-out
article, they have no remorse.
What shocks me
about neoliberalism in all of its forms is how utterly unapologetic it is about
the misery it produces. And it is unapologetic not just in that it is indifferent to the violence it
causes, but it also blames the very victims that suffer under these policies.
The heroine epidemic is part of
these conservative neoliberal policies.
First pharmaceutical companies flood the market with drugs to control
ADD in the schools and over prescribe medications like OxyContin and opiate
based pain medications to relieve suffering.
Next the ruling class enacts laws restricting dispensing of the pain medication
that results in a shortages and opens up a lucrative, illegal black market for
cheaper substitutes like heroine. From
CNN:
Excerpt:
Back in the
1960s, heroin users were usually young men, who started using around an average
age of 16. They were most likely from low-income neighborhoods, and when they
turned to opiates, heroin was their first choice.
Now, more than 50
years later, a study from JAMA paints a very different picture.
Today's typical heroin addict starts using
at 23, is more likely to live in the affluent suburbs and was likely
unwittingly led to heroin through painkillers prescribed by his or her doctor.
While heroin is illicit and opioid pills
such as oxycontin are FDA-approved, each is derived from the poppy plant.
Their chemical structures are highly similar and they bind to the same group of
receptors in the brain. (A few opioids, like fentanyl, are totally synthetic
but designed to bind with those same receptors).
In any case, the
various drugs produce the same result: an increase in pain tolerance and a
sense of euphoria, along with drowsiness, occasional nausea and, at higher
doses, a slowing of the user's breathing.
All these drugs
trigger "tolerance" -- the need to take higher doses for the same
effect -- and a craving for the drug in its absence.
It is precisely
because there are so many similarities that pain pill addicts frequently turn
to heroin when pills are no longer available to them.
Heroin is usually
cheaper than prescription drugs. Opiate
pain medications cost the uninsured about $1 per milligram; so a
60-milligram pill will cost $60. You can obtain the equivalent amount of
heroin for about one-tenth the price…
Last year, the
Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte spent time trying to better understand
the patients who were coming into detox
for heroin. What they found were cops,
lawyers, nurses and ministers who came from some of the best neighborhoods in
the area.
Most of them
shared a common story: "We used to take pills, but now we inject
heroin."
Those are the human costs of the
ABC’s of Armageddon’s conservative ideology of starving the beast. For the ABC’s of Armageddon, the pain and
suffering is nonexistent in their ivory towers.
They could care less about the horrors of a war based economy that
leaves nothing but waste and devastation in its wake, because for them if they
don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.
By Patricia Baeten.
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