Month: February 2023

Out of the world’s 50 most violent cities, 38 are in Latin America including 17 in Mexico.

The Mexico Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice releases its findings on the homicide rate in cities with populations over 300,000 around the world every year.

Statista’s Katharina Buchholz shows in the following infographic, the world’s top 10 most violent cities, with Mexican city Colima in first place and New Orleans in the U.S. state of Louisiana ranking eighth.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, had ranked first in previous editions, but due to the situation in the country, data is no longer available. The majority of the violence in Latin America can be attributed to drug trafficking, gang warfare and political instability.

Another country that appears among the top 50 is Brazil at ten cities, the highest ranked being Mossoró in the country’s North in the 11th spot.

Also featured on the list frequently are Colombia (six cities starting from Cali in rank 32) and South Africa (four cities, including Cape Town and two more ranked in the top 20).

The continental United States racks up seven mentions in total. Other than New Orleans, Baltimore (rank 17), Detroit (rank 23), Memphis (rank 25), Cleveland (rank 27), Milwaukee (rank 39) and Philadelphia (rank 46) make the list.

San Juan in Puerto Rico can be found in rank 41.

Authored by Kyle Anzalone Via AntiWar.com,

In the days after the invasion of Ukraine, the White House assessed President Vladimir Putin would end the attack if the US froze over $300 billion owned by the Russian central bank. However, the Washington-led economic war on Moscow has failed to have a major impact on the Russian economy.

According to Bloomberg, in the immediate reaction to Russian forces invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the White House began to develop the “economic equivalent of a nuclear weapon” to use against Moscow. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan led the team that designed the sanctions on Moscow’s economy and froze $300 billion in assets of the Russian central bank.

The Joe Biden administration believed the economic war inflicted “shock and awe” on the Russian economy. Bloomberg reported some American officials worried the actions would do too much damage to Russia.

So far, the Western economic war on Russia has failed to have its designed impact on Moscow’s economy. Despite predictions of a double-digit GDP contraction in 2022, the Russian economy held firm, with the rouble one of the top-performing currencies against the dollar.

Nicholas Mulder, a Cornell professor specializing in sanctions, says Washington has changed its strategy. “They’ve given up the expectation that this will change Russian decision-making.” He continued, “Instead, they see it as an economic war of attrition.”

Citizens in Western nations have felt the impacts of the economic war. Energy prices have skyrocketed in Europe. Meanwhile, Americans have struggled with decades-high inflation.

In recent years sanctions have become a favorite tool for policymakers in Washington. As foreign policy analyst Richard Hanania explains, “sanctions are used mostly because they give the impression that the American government is doing something between war and nothing.”

The US has maintained extensive sanctions on North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria for decades. The embargoes have failed to change the governments of those countries, but international organizations point out that sanctions have caused citizens of those countries to suffer.

Alena Douhan, the UN Special Rapporteur on coercive measures, said, Social or humanitarian aid “very often can’t be supplied because of sanctions, despite existing exemptions.”

She argued a country targeted by unilateral sanctions can “slide backward on the development scale.” Douhan warned that “sanctions may be a major threat preventing targeted countries from achieving the universal Sustainable Development Goals that are meant to improve the lives of everyone.”

Expert on US economic warfare, Daniel Larison, claims Washington has a credibility issue with its sanctions. “Our government has a real credibility problem in that our promises to lift sanctions and make other concessions are not believable.” He continued, “This greatly complicates the ability of our negotiators to strike bargains with other governments to resolve outstanding disputes.”

Still, the Biden administration is preparing to roll out another traunch of sanctions on Moscow in the coming days. The new sanctions will target Russian banks, the financial sector and the defense industry. The European Union is also planning a new round of sanctions and is considering using the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction.

As the US has sanctioned an increasing number of countries – Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Zimbabwe, China and Russia – institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have grown to facilitate trade between blacklisted countries. “The relationship between countries that are sanctioned by the US, such as Iran, Russia or other countries, can overcome many problems and issues and make them stronger,” Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi said. “The Americans think whichever country they impose sanctions on, it will be stopped. Their perception is a wrong one.”

In a war setting the habit of governments is often to revert to the most ugly and barbaric forms of judgement and punishment, depending on the level of corruption among the officials in charge, so it’s not surprising to see many of these dark behaviors rising within Ukraine.  However, for the past year the violence of martial law and vigilantism by Ukrainian soldiers has been mostly suppressed in western media and social media.  In fact, posting video evidence of these activities would often get you banned on websites like Facebook and Twitter.  

With the changing of management at Twitter, more and more examples are beginning to surface of one particular form of punishment, which involves strapping people to street signs and lamp posts, gagging them and sometimes stripping off their clothes and beating them.  

What’s up with Zelensky’s thugs terrorizing their own citizens by strapping them to street signs & pulling their pants down?? pic.twitter.com/FMRUW8Bdb0

— Michelle🇺🇸 #FJB (@Notmyfault99) February 24, 2023

Pro-Ukrainian media openly admits to the practice, though they try to suggest that the public humiliation is being enacted by random anonymous “vigilantes.”  However, there are videos featuring what appear to be Ukrainian soldiers and others wearing identifying armbands involved in these attacks.  It is hard to say what crimes the victims supposedly committed.  And not surprisingly, Ukraine media defends the actions, comparing them to “hanging a shoplifter’s photo on a wall of shame” at a retail store.

Accusations that lead to public humiliation include looting and theft, but accusations are not proof.  In many instances punishment has been pursued against men who do not want to be conscripted into the war.  In some situations, men who were only working in Ukraine under temporary citizenship are being order to the front.  Rumors abound that authorities are hunting down fighting age men in the streets and interrogating them.  Punishment is swift if they don’t work in a job listed as essential to the war effort.

But the public humiliation tactics are not just for young men escaping war.  Some are punished simply for selling alcohol.  Others are punished for speaking against Ukraine on social media, which is labeled “collaboration” with Russia.  Some are just children.

These people might be the lucky ones, though.  US State Department reports in 2020 document a wide array of human rights abuses by the Ukrainian government before the war was sparked and NATO made Ukraine’s image a priority.  This is not to say that Russia is not also accused of its fair share of rights violations, it’s just rare to find such crimes being discussed in the west when it comes to Ukraine.  

Whether or not an individual deserves this kind of treatment is a separate debate, and frankly, an impossible one.  This is what due process is supposed to achieve – fair justice rather than spontaneous punishment which might be used against the wrongly accused.  Without it, we’ll never know if corporal actions are meant to prevent crime, or if they are meant to oppress and terrorize the population.  The point is, Ukraine has abandoned all due process for the sake of expediency at best, or for the sake of tyranny at worst.     

Authored by Aleksander Svetski via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Bitcoiners are notorious for their over-estimation of how quickly Bitcoin is going to “take over the world” and become “widely adopted as money.”

I’ve sat squarely in that camp for a long time now, but have come to think differently of late.

Before you accuse me of giving up, or call me a flake, I ask that you read on and reserve your opinion until the end.

I like to think that I am maturing in how I view Bitcoin. Call it temperance, patience or a dose of humility — but I am trying to add some realism, or a “lower-time preference” to the often overhyped perception of Bitcoin among some of us. But, as you’ll note, I think on a longer time-scale, none of us are “bullish enough” (hat tip CK).

Let’s dive in…

BITCOIN IS A TECHNO-SOCIO-ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION

People are very quick to project technology adoption curves onto Bitcoin. But the problem is that Bitcoin is not just a technology.

It’s not just a smartphone, or a computer, or a social network, or a new stock or security, or a new payment method, or a search engine, or a messaging platform, or any other new product, app or service.

Bitcoin is an entire techno-socio-economic transformation. It’s a reinvention of money from the ground up, incompatible with any prior primitives.

So, it’s not only orders of magnitude larger as a shift, but it’s also completely different in a paradigmatic sense. These are massive benefits and massive hurdles.

Benefits because:

1. Bitcoin has the most significant upside possible. If it is fixed in supply, and the market it’s going for is global money — implying that it will be the measure against which every stock, property, business, vehicle, handbag or thing that exists on the earth is evaluated — then it follows that Bitcoin will, in time, be the single most liquid and valuable “unit of value” on earth.

2. If it’s incompatible with the old, it is truly a paradigm shift. And if it’s superior (which it’s proven to be across every dimension important for money), then it will not just “compete” with the old guard, but it will completely replace it. This is not a “carving out of a new market,” but a winner-take-all and, fundamentally, “change-the-nature-of-the-game” kind of transformation. It’s much bigger.

Hurdles because:

1. Such a transformation is a big deal. Becoming global money will not be a walk in the park, it will not come easy, it will face many, many headwinds and corpses will line the path along that journey. Change is hard at the best of times, and with the most willing of counterparts. We’ve got neither on our side.

2. The nature of paradigm shifts is that most people don’t see them, and even when they do, they rarely understand them. As such, it takes a while to achieve critical mass (whatever that measure even means), and a much, much longer time to arrive at so-called “mass adoption.” Not only that, but people don’t like to be wrong, especially incumbents, so other than the time factor, you have the push back and ridicule from everyone.

These are both real hurdles and necessary to recognize. You can’t just close your eyes and ears, tweet that “Bitcoin fixes this” and pretend it’s all going to be OK because NgU always happens. No.

We need to understand that we’re playing the “greatest game” as Jeff Booth would say, with the greatest stakes, for the largest winnings, against the greatest foes — both external and internal. We’re fighting both the establishment and the very cultures we’ve been brought up in.

There is more change that needs to occur than any of us could possibly fathom.

I don’t say this to discourage you from Bitcoin, or to make you feel like, “Damn — I’m going to die before I see the upside,” but to a, inspire you that this is probably bigger than you thought, and to b, dose you with some realism so that you can prepare yourself mentally and quit playing short-term games. You have to pace yourself.

Bitcoin is a marathon, not a sprint.

THE THREE GENERATIONS THEORY

Large-scale, socio-economic shifts take generations to settle in and normalize. The old guard needs to die, so to speak, so that those born into the new paradigm can lead.

Each generation is a paradigm shift in and of itself, and each successive such change brings with it a completely new understanding of and relationship to Bitcoin.

Let’s explore these…

GENERATION ONE: THE INFECTION STAGE

We are in the first generation of Bitcoin. Call it the first chapter, or the first “era.” This era or generation will span 20 years and will form the “infection” stage for Bitcoin.

I call it that because, in this stage, Bitcoin is infecting the system. It’s a virus of sorts that latches onto hosts who then act in such a way as to cause it to spread further. Its intent is to infect key infrastructure, key minds, key levers and key systems in the current paradigm. It needs to initially creep in as unnoticed as possible, then form some sort of symbiosis with the host as it grows, so that there emerge mutual benefits for both the ever-expanding set of hosts and the virus (in this case, Bitcoin).

We’ve seen this happen.

In this stage, Bitcoin had to prove that it was something someone would trade for money (or pizza). It had to show a significant, commercial “proof of concept,” which it did with Silk Road. It needed to proceed through an early stage of monetization (Mt. Gox) and it had to then inspire an entire industry of copycats because what it did was so transformative — which we’ve seen with shitcoins.

With this comes a whole lot of speculation, until we finally reach significant enough saturation in total market capitalization or liquidity that we can make a phase transition to a new paradigm.

We’re right in the middle stages of the speculation mini-era of this first generation, or infection stage of Bitcoin’s early life.

While some of us radicals view and use bitcoin as money and our unit of account, the rest of the world generally views it as a speculative asset, or something you “trade” for more USD. There’s a reason why it’s correlated with markets, and while there may be some signs of decoupling, it really is still early and people will continue in the near term to treat it as a “risk-on” asset.

Some people call this a “bad” thing, and argue that it takes away from what the promise of Bitcoin was in the beginning — but I think they’re missing the point. Money makes the world go round, and never more so than in the modern, material world that we live in.

Therefore, to have the greatest impact and ensure the most effective symbiosis, Bitcoin has to be an economic and financial animal. To fix the debauchery, Bitcoin must subsume the debauchery and then slowly, like a virus (or in the case of Bitcoin, an anti-virus), infect the hosts and begin to change them.

The lowering of time preference, and the subsequent adaptation and maturation of people’s behavior is an oft-sighted example of this effect. If you’d like to learn more about that, see Saifedean Ammous’ article in the “Austrian Edition” of The Bitcoin Times: “Making Time Preference Low Again.”

So, there you have it. Generation one, a 20-year time span. We’re 15 years in and very much on track. We have another five years to go before the next generation, and in these five years we will see two more halvings, an enormous amount of speculation and a real acceleration toward that liquidity or saturation of market capitalization I mentioned earlier.

At the same time, behind the scenes, things will be built to set the stage for the next generation. Which of course brings us to…

GENERATION TWO: THE INFRASTRUCTURE STAGE

Imagine being born in 2009, the same year that Bitcoin was.

You grow up and come of age in a world where Bitcoin has always existed. For you, as a kid growing up, you just took it as a given that money is a digital thing, and this convoluted idea of opening up bank accounts, or walking around with printed paper bills and plastic cards just seems foreign or strange to you.

In 2029, you’re turning 20 and perhaps speculation hasn’t really been on your mind yet. Perhaps, instead, you see a problem that needs to be solved, and you simply view Bitcoin as a tool to help you solve it.

Keep in mind that at this stage, bitcoin’s price would be significantly higher and the volatility lower. Things like the Lightning Network will be more advanced, alongside other abstracted layers anchored in Bitcoin. As such, you view all of this early, emergent infrastructure as a toolbox — not so much a speculative asset. In fact, you might view other things that way, and choose to gamble with them, but because a, Bitcoin has matured and the volatility has dampened a bit, and b, so many services now offer bitcoin as a funding option, you decide that it’s the standard against which you’ll measure your gains. It’s no longer the speculative asset first.

There’s even a chance that your parents were Bitcoiners of the first generation and they taught you principles or passed bitcoin over to you and you grew up immersed in it. So, not only is Bitcoin something that’s just “always been around,” it’s something you deeply understand.

Neither are far-fetched ideas, given the era you’ve grown up in. Imagine how you and those in your generation will view Bitcoin and how you’ll all use it. Completely differently, yes.

That’s why I see this next stage as the tooling or infrastructure stage.In this era, Bitcoin will finally move on from the speculators and into the hearts, minds and hands of the builders.

The 20 year olds who are raising capital and building businesses in this era will use Bitcoin, Lightning, and other layers as tools that give them such a significant edge in the world that we will see an entire array of products and services that integrate money into their operations, in much the same way that communication has been embedded in everything we use today.

The incentives will evolve in such a way that having Bitcoin and its abstracted layers in your tool kit will give you superpowers.

But… keep in mind that for much of this era, the generation beforehand will still be pulling the purse strings. There will still be a cultural, normative element that views Bitcoin as foreign or speculative and despite “everything that’s going on,” will fight to hang onto the past.

This era will be the clash of the new builders and generation one Bitcoiners on one side, versus the remaining elite of the old world who still own much of the fiat wealth (stocks, bonds, property, enterprise, shitcoins, etc.). Generation one and two Bitcoiners, especially in the early innings of this era, will still be outnumbered. But of course, no great man ever backed down from a fight — no matter the odds.

You take this period out 20 years, to 2049, and I don’t think any of us can begin to fathom the kind of infrastructure, products and services that will come from it, and how much the tide will shift. Which of course brings me to…

GENERATION THREE: THE MASS ADOPTION STAGE

This is the generation of mass adoption. This is where our children’s children come of age. They will truly not know of a world in which Bitcoin didn’t exist, and may actually enter adulthood without even knowing what fiat is.

The end of this era is when the last remnants of our generation will begin to die off, and whatever duct tape was holding any of the old infrastructure together will melt away. The city of fiat will be abandoned and we’ll enter the true mainstream adoption phase.

You might be thinking, “No man. It will happen faster because look at all the tech that’s going to be built by then.”

But I’d counter that: “Sure, lots of tech will be built then, but I’m pretty certain that a significant number of people will still hesitate to sell their homes, their cars, their products or services for magic internet money.”

That number will have shrunk significantly, but if you think that governments, large corporations and people who have succeeded in life from one method of operation are going to go all in and trust a 40-year-old money over things like property that have been around for thousands of years, then you’re kidding yourself.

Bitcoin is where we’ll end up, but the wealth needs to change hands first and that will take time. This is why I believe this third generation is where the mass adoption phase occurs. They will come of age in a world where we have superior financial technology and an economic infrastructure that will allow them to use bitcoin as capital. The most liquid, the most widely-accessible, the most significant, trusted form of capital available.

Take this to 2069, and you’re talking about a completely different world. This is when Bitcoin truly comes of age. It’s the stage when fiat either dissolves, dies or becomes some relic of the past, while Bitcoin becomes both a global settlement layer and the global money.

It’s the point in which Bitcoin or some abstracted application layer anchored into it forms an integral part of almost all technological applications used by people from all around the world.

At this point, Bitcoin is no longer the virus, but has united with and created a new host.

What happens beyond that, I do not know. But it’s exciting to think about. We’ll be in a very new paradigm by that point.

FOR OUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN

You’ll note by my language that my certainty about what happens at each stage diminishes as we get further out. I’m pretty sure of what the next five years hold, and I have a level of confidence for at least the first half of the second era, but beyond that I can only assume and give broad strokes as to what’s likely.

This is because I’m human and humans always underestimate compound effects, while Bitcoin is subject to more compounding effects than just about anything else we know of (at the very least as an asset, if not other things). With each day that passes and each new satoshi held by each new user, with each new miner that plugs in, each new merchant that accepts bitcoin, each new node that runs and each new Lightning channel opened, Bitcoin compounds and grows.

None of us are ready for what this means across three full generations, and sadly, a lot of us won’t live to see it. But that’s the straw we’ve drawn.

Our generation has bestowed upon us both the gift of being the founding fathers of a new world, and the curse of enduring clown world for this privilege. While we may not get to really enjoy the fruits of this labor, we will have been the generation that goes down in the history books as the one that changed it all.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a trade off worth making.

First generation Bitcoiners are like those who laid the foundation and the first stones for the cathedrals of the ancient and feudal eras. They’d never live to see these structures finished, but they would forever be memorialized as their founders.

And who knows — perhaps we’ll look down from the next realm and admire what we’ve done, like those greats who came before us did for their creations.

I don’t know.

What matters, and I will leave you with this, is to recognize that Bitcoin is a multi-generational phenomenon. It’s not Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, a smartphone, PayPal, Visa, a stock or a mere commodity. It’s so much bigger than all of these combined and, because of how fundamentally significant this is, it will take people time to adopt it.

It will take a few generations to normalize. It will take our deaths to see it reach its potential — not that we need to be round up and shot, but that our generation needs to give way to the next and the next for the new paradigm to truly take hold. Once we’re gone, Bitcoin will truly flourish.

I hope you keep that in mind when thinking about Bitcoin.

We need to be careful about projecting technology adoption curves on it, and through disappointment, attempt to tinker with it. What is not broken doesn’t always need to be fixed or upgraded, and in fact, perhaps Bitcoin’s number one feature of all is the fact that it will not change, or change very little in the timescales I’ve referred to in this essay.

If Bitcoin’s consensus rules have remained unchanged and it has “tick-tock, next block’d” for three, four, five decades, then people will naturally have developed the thing that matters most for a new socio-economic standard and paradigm: trust.

And as much as Bitcoiners hate that word, trust matters — the truth is that you most trust that which you can verify. This is why Bitcoin will ultimately be the most trusted monetary, economic, and communications layer on earth, after a few generations.

*  *  *

Svetski is the author of “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” founder of The Bitcoin Times and Host of the “Wake Up Podcast with Svetski.” Follow him at SvetskiWrites on Twitter for more, and keep an eye out for his new book “The Bushido Of Bitcoin,” which will be available for pre-order on Geyser.fund in March.

Around half of Americans are healthy eaters, at least according to their own testimonies.

As Katharina Buchholz reports, according to Statista Consumer Insights, 50 percent of Americans claim to actively try to eat healthy. 

You will find more infographics at Statista

The attitude is most prevalent among Baby Boomers at 58 percent agreeing, but not much lower among Gen Z, where 44 percent said they were pursuing the aim.

At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found out that more than 36 percent of Americans are consuming fast food regularly, to the extend that on any given day, a third of Americans is eating from fast food restaurants.

In a separate survey by the Cleveland Clinic, 46 percent of U.S. adults said a barrier to eating healthy foods was their price. Almost a quarter of Americans stated that they had to little time to cook and prepare healthy foods, while a high 20 percent said they didn’t know how to cook healthy foods.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”

– President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.