Slide In Life Expectancy For American Men Continues Amid Spike In “Deaths Of Despair”
The National Center for Health Statistics’ latest annual report dropped Wednesday morning. And like reports from the last few years, the takeaway from this year’s batch of numbers is this: American men are in trouble.
Another drop in life expectancy for that demographic has brought the average life expectancy for American men to 76.1 years in 2017, the year for which the data have been finalized and released. That’s compared with 76.5 in 2014, according to the data – a not-insignificant drop.
Once they reach age 65, men are projected to live another 18.1 years, compared with 20.6 years for women, according to Bloomberg, which cited data from the study.
What’s more, life expectancy has been falling across demographics in America. The estimates for whites, blacks and Hispanics fell to 78.5, 74.9 and 81.8 respectively in 2017, after peaking in 2012 or 2014.
Of course, the biggest driver of these falling life-expectancy rates isn’t gun violence – though, based on the mainstream media’s coverage, one might have reason to think that. No, the biggest force behind what’s killing more young, (mostly white) men is what they call “deaths of despair.” That is, suicides, overdoses and any deaths stemming from mental health or substance-abuse issues.
The opioid crisis hammered the US with the arrival of fentanyl in the illicit drug supply around 2007, and between then and 2017, the mortality rate from drug overdoses increased by a staggering 82%, to 21.7 deaths from 11.9 per 100,000.
Over the same 10-year period, suicide rates increased 24% to 14 deaths per 100,000, up from 11.3. The rise has been so rapid, and so shocking, that in 2017, suicide became the second leading cause of death, behind accidents, for young age groups: 10–14, 15–19, and 20–24, with younger males in particular strongly impacted.
Nationwide, the overdose rate for males has risen twice as much as the overdose rate for females, as the opioid epidemic has moved from the inner cities to the suburbs, ensnaring a generation of white men. According to the report, the recent increases were especially pronounced among men aged 25–34 and 35–44.
But drug overdoses and suicide aren’t the only factors impacting the health of Americans. Obesity and other chronic health conditions are taking their toll. As BBG says, many Americans are suffering from poor health, and about one-third of adults suffer from a condition that limits functionality.
This will become a serious problem as the population ages. The number of adults age 65 and over struggling with poor health, which impacts families and increases pressure on health services and social care, increased from 14.7 million in 2010 to 20.4 million in 2017.
Between 1999–2000 and 2015–2016, the age-adjusted prevalence of obesity among men increased from 27.4% to 38.1%. For woman, it’s even worse: the prevalence of obesity for them increased from 33.3% to 41.2% over the same roughly 15-year period.
Not all data were negative: For example, there was some improvement last year in the number of American adults who delayed medical care, typically a group that encompasses some of the poorest Americans. Only 7.4% of Americans delayed or did not receive needed medical care due to the cost involved in 2017, that figure is down from 10.9% in 2010. And on a per capita basis, Americans spent $10,739 on health expenditures in 2017.
On Oct 15., it was announced that Neil Woodford’s flagship Equity Income fund (WEI), which has blocked redemptions since June, would be closed for good. And signs are emerging that the problems that bedeviled WEI may be spreading to the wider UK equity fund sector. Across all UK-domiciled funds, investors pulled £2.1 billion in September taking net outflows this year to £7.3 billion, according to data from Morning Star.
Here are the active funds that bore the brunt of the exodus:
Standard Life Aberdeen’s flagship Gars fund, which saw outflows of £392 million in September and which is down £8.9 billion over the past 12 months, shrinking the fund’s asset base to £6.5 billion.
Majedie, an £11 billion active equity boutique that suffered £269 million of redemptions, a monthly record.
Lindsell Train, the largest managed UK shares fund, also registered a record £374 million of net outflows in September despite returning 25% over the first nine months of 2019. Confidence in the fund was hit by the decision in July of the UK’s biggest broker, Hargreaves Lansdown, to remove the Lindsell Train UK Equity Fund from its Wealth 50 Best List due to liquidity concerns.
Invesco’s UK-focused funds, which suffered the biggest wave of redemptions in September — £967 million — and is down £8 billion over the past 12 months.
Invesco’s UK business was, ironically, managed, with incredible success, by Neil Woodford until 2013, when he left the U.S. firm to set up his own investment company, taking many of his Invesco clients with him. So formidable was Woodford’s reputation in the fund sector at that time that he was able to raise £10 billion in his first two years of going solo.
For Invesco, the opposite happened. Since Woodford’s departure, the firm’s UK-focused funds have leaked £15.4 billion. More than half of those funds were redeemed in the last year alone. Things were hardly helped when the two main funds — the Invesco High Income fund and Invesco Income fund — featured prominently in Bestinvest’s 2018 “Spot the Dog” report, which highlights the sector’s worst performers. In September, it saw its worst outflows since Woodford’s departure.
What appears to have spooked many investors is the fact that the man picked to replace Woodford, his protege Mark Barnett, appears to be following the exact same playbook of his one-time mentor. Like Woodford, Barnett has been placing massive bets on companies that are often difficult to trade. In total, Barnett has poured more than two thirds of the £6.1 billion Invesco High Income Fund into higher yielding but largely illiquid micro-, small-, and mid-cap stocks, up from less than a quarter when he took over in 2014.
As the collapse of WEI has shown, betting big on illiquid investments carries large risks for open-ended funds that, on the one hand, offer their shareholders the opportunity to redeem their funds whenever they want while, on the other hand, pouring those same funds into investments that can take weeks or months to sell.
It is this sort of liquidity mismatch that the Bank of England has been warning about for years. If investors in an open-ended fund decide to pull their money en masse, which they’re ostensibly allowed to do at just about any time, the fund could struggle to liquidate its assets in time if those assets are not very liquid. It’s precisely what happened at Woodford’s flagship fund, which saw its asset base crumble from £10 billion to £3.7 billion in the space of just three years, before the gates were slammed shut on the remaining investors in May.
This ability of investors to yank out their money at virtually the drop of a hat can create “an incentive [for them] to redeem when they expect others to do so,” said the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee (FPC) in July, adding that this mismatch in liquidity “has the potential to become a systemic issue.”
It’s not just the Bank of England that’s flagging up this problem; so, too, are EU regulators as well as senior figures in the fund industry. Amundi’s chief investment officer, Pascal Blanqué, recently warned that the asset management sector could be on the cusp of a wider liquidity crisis, as a result of the fears sparked by Woodford’s downfall.
“This business is a trade-off between risk, return and liquidity,” he said.
“We have the ingredients of looming liquidity mismatches across the industry.”
An added cause for concern cited by Blanqué is that banks have pared back their dealer and market making activity following the global financial crisis. Having scaled back the amount of risk they take, due in part to more stringent capital requirements from regulators, banks’ diminished ability, or willingness, to absorb liquidity demand during selloff periods could pose wider problems for fund managers.
The more that those fund managers stray into less liquid assets, in a desperate hunt for returns in a yield-starved world, the greater the threat this vulnerability could pose to financial stability.
“We’ve seen a frantic search for yield on the buy side, pushed by [central banks’ quantitative easing programs],” said Blanqué.
“The combination of a frantic search for yield, and the deterioration of market liquidity, can create mismatches.”
Such mismatches have already caused liquidity problems this year for London-based H2O Asset Management and Swiss-based GAM. Three years ago, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, six commercial real estate (CRE) funds were forced to suspend redemptions for the same reason.
Now, those same mismatches have led to the downfall and disgrace of Woodford, one of Britain’s most revered stock pickers, while decimating the savings of hundreds of thousands of retails investors. It has also shone a bright spotlight on the dangers of entrusting one’s money with open-ended funds that, in turn, plow that money into illiquid assets.
It appears that many investors, now aware of the first-mover advantage with open-end mutual funds, and already leery about the risks of a no-deal Brexit and fearful that what happened at Woodford could happen to them, are making their way as calmly as possible to the exits.
CEO Says Consumer “Shaming” Will Have “Terrible Social Consequences”
Be careful what you ‘virtue-signal’ for, is the message from one of the biggest names in the fashion and retail space.
While it’s all well and good to proclaim ‘bad man orange’ at everything you may disagree with, or pile on policies that self-aggrandize (and divide your audience), Karl-Johan Persson, the 44-year-old H&M CEO and son of its billionaire chairman, is speaking out as a pattern of shaming that initially targeted air travelers spreads into more industries, including his.
The growing movement to shame non-virtue-aligned consumers represents a very real social threat. As Bloomberg reports, Persson, who has been running H&M for a decade, says his concern is that the movement seeks to prohibit behaviors.
Many of the protests are “about ‘stop doing things, stop consuming, stop flying’.”
His fear is simple:
“Yes, that may lead to a small environmental impact, but it will have terrible social consequences.”
According to the UN, the clothing industry is responsible for about 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions and consumes more energy than aviation and shipping combined, so it is no wonder that social-justice-warriors are ‘triggered’.
But, while Persson agrees that “we must reduce the environmental impact,” he chides that in the real world:
“At the same time we must also continue to create jobs, get better healthcare and all the things that come with economic growth.”
It’s not like Persson is not doing his part, as Bloomberg notes that by 2040, H&M intends to be climate positive, which it says means reducing more greenhouse gas emissions than its value chain emits.
Since the moment the votes were totaled in the June 2016 Brexit referendum there has been nothing but handwringing about what it implied. The Brexit vote showed, quite clearly, that growing political unions were unsustainable.
It was the first in a series of electoral losses where the people finally said enough to an expanding EU.
Four months later the US voted Donald Trump, of all people, into the White House, again throwing into the air another ‘two fingers up’ to the Western political establishment that wanted to break down borders and blur the lines between nation states.
Trump’s first moves were to nullify the Paris Accord on Climate Change and both the TTIP and TPP. These are all globalist, transnational treaties designed to usurp national governments and put control of the world economy into the hands of corporations with little recourse to the courts for those harmed.
In 2017 Catalonia held an independence referendum against the wishes of Spain’s government which used force to stop it from happening. Today the leaders of that independence movement are convicted felons in exile facing more than a decade in prison while the streets of Barcelona are filled with outrage.
In Italy, dire conditions there thanks to the euro, Angela Merkel’s immigration policy stemming from a failed bid to atomize Syria and the growing EU political integration, ended the 2018 election with two Euroskeptics from opposite ends of the political spectrum forging a populist government. This was eventually betrayed by one party, Five Star Movement, through the undemocratic process of refusing new elections because the polls had shifted further away from the pro-EU position.
The polls have not shifted back even though Matteo Salvini and Lega have been deposed from power.
Germany’s 2017 election ended with another unpopular, and now distinctly minority, coalition forming to stop Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) coming to power. The Greens are ascendant as the Social Democrats collapse. Merkel presides over a zombie Bundestag.
And today, three years after Brexit and Trump’s victory, powerful forces are working expressly against the people to overthrow both of these results through cynical and reprehensible acts of political vandalism, hamstringing leadership without a care of the long-term societal damage it is causing.
In fact, I’d argue that the societal damage is the goal of these moves to thwart the people’s desires in the hope that they take it out on each other rather than the ones setting the table in the first place.
The endless maneuvering in the British Parliament to block any form of meaningful Brexit has placed Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the position of having to sacrifice part of his country to have any chance of success.
And what success he’s achieved still leaves Brexit’s fate in limbo. So, in effect, he’s won the ultimate Pyrrhic victory which will leave him in a political no-man’s land after finally getting a general election held where the Tories have to ally with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party to have a prayer of forming a government capable of governing.
All of these events are symptoms of the real problem which those pulling the strings behind the scenes do not want to admit to, most of the people hate both them and their grand plans.
We live in a rapidly decentralizing age where technology gives us access to information in real time that used to take us months, if not years, to properly disseminate and then it was only to those who were already fellow travelers.
And that has empowered in ways no one currently wielding power is comfortable with.
The reality of reaching out en masse to others along the political and socio-economic spectrum to discuss the merits of changing the course of society was simply not possible even ten years ago.
And today those forces of decentralization are the real problem facing these elites who have enjoyed the illusion of running the world for the past few generations.
But these events like Brexit, Trump, Catalonia and others are castigated as the real problems not the symptoms of the much deeper problems caused by unsustainable political and economic systems based on fraud, cheap money, theft and propaganda.
George Galloway, writing for RT, identified a real divide within the United Kingdom that Brexit has exposed, the fallacy that Ireland is two separate countries.
The six counties of the north east of Ireland were unnaturally torn from the Irish motherland a century ago, but its status was always historically speaking, doomed.
Despite its Gerrymandered borders, tortuously carved to ensure a built-in Protestant (pro-British unionist) majority, and its near-apartheid treatment of its Catholic minority including disenfranchisement of many, the writing was already on the wall. As my own family demonstrates, Catholics simply have bigger families than Protestants. That and the emigration of a steady stream of educated Protestants unwilling to stick around in the thoroughly abnormal statelet they call Northern Ireland. Neither Irish nor British, dominated by a brand of sectarian politics, at least half-a-century an embarrassment, a steady stream of northern Protestants simply voted with their feet and a ticket to England.
George goes on to say that despite the noises from the Scottish National Party (SNP) the likelihood of Scotland trading its current support structure coming from Westminster to the austerity demanded by Brussels is laughable.
I won’t argue with George on that, he knows his people far better than I do. But I will say that the divisions between these countries – England, Scotland and Wales – are deep enough that a breaking point isn’t far-fetched.
What is very clear to me, however, is that even older unnatural agglomerations of ‘countries’ into constructs like the U.K. are showing the strains of holding fast against a world where technology is rapidly empowering individuals to trade across arbitrary political borders.
This is in stark opposition to the arguments for the European Union; that to compete the small countries of Europe need a big common political structure to compete against the U.S, India, Russia and China.
But the reality is that those big countries are all at different points along the same path the U.K. is on with respect to Ireland. From where I sit, the US is becoming multiple regional fiefdoms just like the U.K.
We are quickly becoming peoples separated by a common language, to invoke George Bernard Shaw, which is sowing enmity and division between the states to levels that haven’t existed since the run up to what is commonly misreferred to as the US Civil War.
Properly framed, that war was one fought by President Lincoln to preserve the Union not stave off an attack on Washington by forces that wanted to wrest control of the government. That is a civil war.
The wars being fought today by the leadership in Brussels are similar to the one Lincoln fought. These are political wars fought against the current will of the people to prevent secession from the EU – Brexit, Italeave, Catalonia.
When people are denied their rights through the political process, however, the inevitable next step is through violence. And that is what comes next unless those in power accede to reality.
For his part, Donald Trump is beginning to see this with respect to US occupation of foreign countries like Syria and Afghanistan. In the coming weeks Iraq may try and make that decision for him.
Events there and in Lebanon, thanks to crippling acts of war known colloquially as ‘sanctions,’ bear watching carefully as any resolution which abrogates existing debt and political alliances will have immense downstream consequences for the region.
But between now and then we can bet on more of the same behavior from disconnected and corrupt politicians who are so caught up in their own solipsistic fugue they won’t see the end of their political lives until the guillotines are wheeled into the capitol square.
Referring to a UK judge’s decision on Monday to deny the WikiLeaks founder a delay in US extradition proceedings, Waters proclaimed:
“Orwell and Huxley were always arguing about who had the closest view of what dystopia might look like in the future… I think we got a lot of both.”
As RT summarizes, the world described by George Orwell in ‘1984’ was one of mass surveillance and paranoia, where anyone could be snatched off the street by the state and made disappear for ‘wrongthink’. In ‘Brave New World’ Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, described a future where mass entertainment and the easy availability of pleasure-giving drugs made dissent virtually impossible.
“We have the ‘Big Brother’ Orwellian dystopian nightmare, it happened two days ago in that magistrate’s court,” he explained to RT.
And, exposing our ‘Brave New World’-isms, Waters points out that:
“You only have to look out in the street and see the people, the walking dead going by… and taking absolutely no notice of the fact that this journalist is being murdered by our government.”
“And we walk by with our earbuds in… clicking away on our iPhones as we walk unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring through our lives,and allow this bullshit to take place in our names, in our courts,” Waters concluded.
Together with veteran journalist John Pilger, the Pink Floyd frontman hosted a rally for Assange in front of the British Home Office in September, that went unreported by every single British newspaper.
As Craig Murray recent concluded, the campaign of demonisation and dehumanisation against Julian, based on government and media lie after government and media lie, has led to a situation where he can be slowly killed in public sight, and arraigned on a charge of publishing the truth about government wrongdoing, while receiving no assistance from “liberal” society.
Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?
“Since 2015, 32 people have been shot dead in 30 separate acts in Malmö’s latest murder wave. Our survey of the murders shows that more than 120 young men are linked to them in different ways”,according to a recent series of reports about gang violence in the Swedish mainstream newspaper, Sydsvenskan.
“There is much talk about ‘gang wars’ in Malmö,” the report relates.
“Nothing indicates that there are fixed groupings with hierarchical structures and regulated activities in Malmö’s crime world. Rather, on the contrary — everything can be seen as one single gang. And there is civil war [within the gang]. We have mapped 200 criminals in the city. Most of them know each other – they have grown up together, been schoolmates, shared housing and moved in the same circles. Of these, we have selected 20 men for closer examination. Either because they are suspected of having shot, planned or otherwise contributed to the murders. Or that they themselves have fallen victim. And for being identified… as central people in Malmö’s crime world in recent years. At least 18 of the murders have, according to our review, occurred within the relatively narrow circle of these 20 men”.
The report then mentions that “17 of the 20 surveyed men have Swedish citizenship and 14 are born in Sweden.”
“Almost everyone has parents who have come here mainly from the Middle East and Africa. Altogether, they have been convicted of at least 180 crimes — everything from driving a car without a driver’s license to robbery, weapons crimes, assault and murder. One of them is on Europol’s list of our continent’s most wanted criminals, suspected of having ordered two murders… Half of them have parents who are also convicted of crimes. Drug crimes, harassment, money laundering, theft, smuggling and serious abuse. But there are also examples of parents with stable incomes and an academic background”.
In Sweden, crucial societal issues, such as who is behind the current crime epidemic, are a public taboo. Swedish authorities have only published statistics about the ethnic backgrounds of criminals twice: in 1996 and in 2005. In 2017, Minister of Justice Morgan Johansson — who is also Minister of Justice and Migration in the current Swedish government — refused to publish statistics about the ethnic origins of criminals in Sweden. “So the political conclusions that I need to make, I can already make with existing international and Swedish studies,” he said at the time.
The majority of the political parties in the Swedish parliament agreed with him. They said they did not think such a statistic was needed.
This summer, nevertheless, a private foundation, Det Goda Samhället (“The Good Society”) published a report, based on statistics from Swedish authorities. The report showed:
“For the first time now, more crimes — in absolute terms — are committed by persons of foreign background than by persons of Swedish origin…The most crime-prone population subgroup are people born [in Sweden] to two foreign-born parents”.
The mainstream Swedish media, however, largely ignored the privately published report.
This general suppression of information is why Sydsvenskan’s account is especially remarkable — although in recent years, media reports have become slightly more common. It is hard, after all, completely to escape reality. In 2017, when Stockholm was hit by a wave of murders, the Swedish mainstream media outlet Expressen, did a report about the 49 criminal networks in the capital that showed the networks consisted of between 500 and 700 gang members. 40.6% of the gang members that Expressen surveyed were foreign-born; 82.2% had two parents who were foreign-born. Their main country of origin was Iraq, followed by Bosnia, Lebanon, Somalia, Syria and Turkey.
More remarkably, Sydsvenskan’s report also indicated that nothing could be done about the hardened criminals:
“With the exception of three people in the survey, all have been offered help since they were boys. Some of them were already registered with the police as ten-year-olds… They have undergone programs… far from the criminal environment in Malmö… It has not worked… what the social services have done so far does not help, and there are no more measures to try out”.
These are facts that mainstream politicians have avoided discussing openly for years. The question is: How do you solve a critical societal problem, especially one that is literally maiming and killing people, without talking about it openly?
Even the Swedish government, however, has realized that it is time to tackle the gang violence, which, with its waves of shootings and bombing, is fast derailing Swedish society. Some commentators have likened the situation to a state of war. The government therefore recently presented a new initiative that seeks to tackle the gang violence. The government proposal, however, never specifically mentions who is mainly behind the gang violence and that its own migration policies have in large part created the situation in which Swedish society now finds itself.
The proposals to tackle gang violence include: More detentions for those who commit serious crimes, faster prosecutions, better opportunities to access the assets of criminals, increased investments in schools and social services in “vulnerable areas”, more social services in the evenings and weekends in “vulnerable areas”, stricter penalties for those recruiting young people to crime, stricter penalties for weapons and explosives offenses and better witness protection programs.
Ulf Kristersson, leader of the largest opposition party, the center-right Moderate Party, criticized the government for not suggesting harder crackdowns on gang crime. The Moderate Party would have liked to see larger investments in the police, doubling the penalties for gang criminals and a system of visitation zones, among other things.
One might ask whether it is likely that the government’s rather mild proposals for tackling gang violence will make enough difference at this point. Gang crime has become extremely violent and extremely serious. The Nigerian gang Black Axe, for instance, engages in drug-trafficking and prostitution and also operates extensively in Italy, where Italian police have described it as using “urban guerrilla warfare which continued for days at a time” to maintain territorial control. Swedish police estimate that the gang, which has been establishing itself in Stockholm for the past five years, seems pretty thoroughly entrenched. “In my opinion,” said the head of police squad, Lennart Karlsson, “this is one of the world’s most effective crime syndicates. So unfortunately for us, they probably have a pretty bright future.”
In addition to Black Axe, There are approximately 50 other criminal gangs, encompassing around 1,500 criminals, operating in Stockholm, according to recent information from the police. Stockholm is currently going through a wave of shootings; by the beginning of August there had already been 58 this year. According to the police’s expert on gang violence, Gunnar Appelgren, the harm is considerably more serious today than it was five years ago, because the criminals now make greater use of automatic weapons.
It does not seem likely that any of these hardened criminals will be swayed much by “increased investments in schools and social services in ‘vulnerable areas'”, as one of the government proposals suggests. Maybe some of the other proposals will improve the situation, but a far harsher crackdown on gang violence might regrettably be needed.
China Blasts Trump Admin For “Economic Bullying Behavior” Over 5G Equipment Ban
Round the clock, investors are blasted with trade tweets from President Trump. These tweets are meaningless to an extent, with only one intention to control the economic narrative to drive the stock market higher. So with trade optimism and stock prices at record highs levels, it seems like China is ruining the party on Tuesday morning.
New details are emerging from AP News of souring relations between China and the US — not exactly improving as per the tweets President Trump has recently unleashed right before the stock market opens and during the morning hours.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang accused the US of “economic bullying behavior” after US officials cited national security concerns in using Chinese equipment in US communication networks.
Shuang told reporters that Beijing would “resolutely oppose the US abusing state power to suppress specific Chinese enterprises with unwarranted charges in the absence of any evidence.”
“The economic bullying behavior of the US is a denial of the market economy principle that the US has always advertised,” Shuang said, adding the economic sanctions would “undermine the interests” of US businesses and consumers, especially in rural areas.
“We would like to urge the US once again to stop abusing the concept of national security,” Shuang said.
The Trump administration has intervened in communication networks, picking winners and losers over the last several years, all in the name of national security.
President Trump is gifting the buildout of US’ 5G networks to companies that are aligned with his administration, rather than letting the industry decide which 5G products are the best and most cost-effective. The administration is likely setting up for a complete ban on Huawei and ZTE 5G equipment in US communication networks.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai announced Monday that the agency, in an upcoming vote on Nov. 19, will likely ban all US carriers from using federal subsidies to purchase 5G equipment from Chinese companies.
“The concern is that hostile foreign actors could use hidden ‘backdoors’ to our networks to spy on us, steal from us, harm us with malware and viruses, or otherwise exploit our networks,” Pai said on Monday. “And there are mounting reasons to believe that the Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE pose an unacceptable risk to US national security.”
The FCC ruling could also force companies that operate communication networks in the US to swap out already installed Chinese equipment for other brands, and the move could cost smaller companies in rural towns more than $1 billion.
Despite President Trump’s tweets generating an illusion of warming ties between the US and China (all to pump the stock market), the decoupling of the world’s largest two economies continues.
“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
All is not as it seems.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”
In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.
Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.
The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?
Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.
Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.
Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.
If we’re watching, we’re not doing.
The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he restores hope by delivering America a wake-up call for freedom.
That’s the key right there: we need to wake up.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
The real battle for control of this nation is not being waged between Republicans and Democrats in the ballot box.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes, if we would only open them.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
Retired General: Trump’s Syria Oil Plan Turns US Troops Into “Pirates”
After President Trump suggested on Sunday that he would like to make a deal with Exxon Mobil or “one of our great companies” to go into occupied Syria and take the oil, one of the few former top defense officials to explicitly condemn the plan which clearly smacks of naked US imperialism was retired General Barry McCaffrey.
Referencing Trump’s comments, an outraged McCaffrey posed the question on Twitter, “WHAT ARE WE BECOMING… PIRATES?”
He further stressed that the oil “belongs to Syria” and that ultimately “we lack Congressional authority to stay” in the country at all.
US convoy this week in northeast Syria. Image source: AP
The former US Army four star and MSNBC regular was one the few mainstream pundits this week to critique Washington’s Syria policy by questioning the entirety of America’s presence there in the first place, essentially calling it ‘illegal’.
Most establishment commentators have thus far ignored the imperialist aggression aspect of what appears a big oil grab on yet another US-occupied piece of the Middle East, and opted to argue the Pentagon should be “doing more” for the Syrian Kurds —meaning more of the same endless US occupation.
On Monday Defense Secretary Mark Esper spelled out that a deployment of some few hundred US troops will deny Syrian government access to oilfields in the northeast, instead ensuring they stay in Kurdish-led SDF hands.
The immediate justification given by the Pentagon chief was the usual ‘defeat ISIS’ mantra (despite, ironically, their leader Baghdadi being taken out in Saturday’s US raid into Idlib).
4-Star General Barry McCaffrey
“We want to make sure that SDF does have access to the resources in order to guard the [IS] prisons, in order to arm their own troops, in order to assist us with the ‘defeat ISIS’ mission,” Esper said.
One international legal expert, Anthony Cordesman, told The Guardian of the Pentagon plan that, “In international law, you can’t take civilian goods or seize them. That would amount to a war crime.”
Of course, it’s not as if Washington ever stopped to think twice about such abstract concepts as ‘international law’ — especially when in comes to military action and adventurism in the Middle East.
Oct. 27, 1962, is the date on which we humans were spared extinction thanks to Soviet Navy submarine Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov.
Arkhipov insisted on following the book on using nuclear weapons. He overruled his colleagues on Soviet submarine B-59, who were readying a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo to fire at the USS Randolph task force near Cuba without the required authorization from Moscow.
Communications links with naval headquarters were down, and Arkhipov’s colleagues were convinced WWIII had already begun. After hours of battering by depth charges from US warships, the captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky, screamed, “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not disgrace our Navy!” But Captain Arkipov’s permission was also required. He countermanded Savitsky and B-59 came to the surface.
Much of this account of what happened on submarine B-59 is drawn from Daniel Ellsberg’s masterful book, “The Doomsday Machine” — one of the most gripping and important books I have ever read. Dan explains, inter alia, on pages 216-217 the curious circumstance whereby the approval of Arkhipov, chief of staff of the submarine brigade at the time, was also required.
Ellsberg adds that had Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans), there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying destroyers would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion.
Equally chilling, says Dan:
The source of this explosion would have been mysterious to other commanders in the Navy and officials on the ExComm, since no submarines known to be in the region were believed to carry nuclear warheads. The clear implication on the cause of the nuclear destruction of this antisubmarine hunter-killer group would have been a medium-range missile from Cuba whose launch had not been detected. That is the event that President Kennedy had announced on October 22 would lead to a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
‘The Most Dangerous Moment in Human History’
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, later described Oct. 27, 1962, as Black Saturday, calling it “the most dangerous moment in human history.” On that same day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an all-out invasion of Cuba to destroy the newly emplaced Soviet missile bases there. Kennedy, who insisted that former US Ambassador to Russia Llewelyn Thompson attend the meetings of the crisis planning group, rejected the advice of the military and, with the help of his brother Robert, Ambassador Thompson, and other sane minds, was able to work out a compromise with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
As for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president had already concluded that the top military were unhinged Russophobes, and that they deserved the kind of sobriquet used by Under Secretary of State George Ball applied to them — a “sewer of deceit.” As Ellsberg writes (in his Prologue, p. 3):
“The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a US first strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts.” And yet the fools pressed on, as in trying to cross “The Big Muddy.”
Intelligence Not So Good
The pre-Cuban-missile crisis performance of the intelligence community, including Pentagon intelligence, turned out to hugely inept. The US military, for example, was blissfully unaware that the Soviet submarines loitering in the Caribbean were equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes. Nor did US intelligence know that the Russians had already mounted nuclear warheads on some of the missiles installed in Cuba and aimed at the US (The US assumption on Oct. 27 was that the warheads had not been mounted.)
It was not until 40 years later, at a Cuban crisis “anniversary” conference in Havana, that former US officials like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy learned that some of their key assumptions were dead and dangerously wrong. (Ellsberg p. 215ff)
Today the Establishment media has inculcated into American brains that it is a calumny to criticize the “intelligence community.” This is despite the relatively recent example of the concocting of outright fraudulent “intelligence” to “justify” the attack on Iraq in 2003, followed even more recently, sans evidence, falsely accusing Putin himself of ordering Russian intelligence to “hack” the computers of the Democratic National Committee. True, the US intelligence performance on Russia and Cuba in 1962 came close to getting us all killed in 1962, but back then in my view it was more a case of ineptitude and arrogance than outright dishonesty.
As for Cuba, one of the most consequential CIA failures was the formal Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) of Sept. 19, 1962, which advised President Kennedy that Russia would not risk trying to put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. To a large extent this judgment was a consequence of one of the cardinal sins of intelligence analysis — “mirror imaging.” That is, we had warned the Russians strongly against putting missiles in Cuba; they knew the US, in those years would not take that kind of risk; ergo, they would take us at our word and avoid blowing up the world over Cuba. Or so the esteemed NIE estimators thought.
The Russians, too, were mirror imaging. Khrushchev and his advisers regarded US nuclear war planners as rational actors acutely aware of the risks of escalation, who would shy away from ending life immediately for hundreds of millions of human beings. Their intelligence was not very good on the degree of Russophobia infecting Air Force General Curtis LeMay and others on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were prepared to countenance hundreds of millions of deaths in order “to end the Soviet threat.” (Ellsberg was there; he provides a first-hand account of the craziness in “The Doomsday Machine.”)
Where Did the Grenade Launchers Go?
I reported for active duty at Infantry Officers School at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Nov. 3, 1962, six days after the incident. Most of us new lieutenants had heard about a new weapon, the grenade launcher, and were eager to try it out. There were none to be found. Lots of other weapons normally used for training were also missing.
After we made numerous inquiries, the brass admitted that virtually all the grenade launchers and much of the other missing arms and vehicles had been swept up and carried south by a division coming through Georgia a week or so before. All of it was still down in the Key West area, we were told. Tangible signs as to how ready the JCS and Army brass were to attack Cuba, were President Kennedy to have acceded to their wishes.
Had that happened, it is likely that neither you nor I would be reading this. Yet, down at Benning, there were moans and groans complaining that we let the Commies off too easy.
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer from 1962-64 and later served as Chief of CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and morning briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
