The richest vein in the history of predatory mining is just about played out.
A gigantic mine engages in every conceivable destructive practice—strip mining, heap leaching, tailings dams and ponds and so on. It pays such low wages its workers only make ends meet by borrowing from the company at usurious rates. The mine has befouled the air and poisoned the water. Many workers are chronically sick and their children are afflicted with birth defects. The mine’s absentee owners know that the mine is played out and the tailings dam is structurally unsound. They close the mine, count their profits, and move on. A month later the dam gives way. A deluge of noxious sludge inundates the town below the dam, sparing no one and rendering the area uninhabitable.
The government is a strip mining operation, plundering the dwindling residual value of a once wealthy America. Forget ostensible justifications, policy is crafted to allow those who control the government to maximize their take and put the costs on their victims, leaving devastation in their wake.
Wars are no longer about defending the country or even making the world safe for democracy. They are about appropriations, not to be won, but profitably prolonged. The Middle East and Northern Africa have been a mother lode. You would think their sixteen-year war in backward and impoverished Afghanistan would be a shameful disgrace for the military and the intelligence agencies. It’s not. They’ve milked that conflict for all its worth, and now brazenly talk about a “generational war”: many more years of more of the same.
We can also look forward to generational wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The strip miners are agitating for an Iranian foray. That’s got Into The 22nd Century written all over it, a rich, multi-generational vein, perhaps America’s first 100-year war.
The only rival for richest mother lode is medicine. Health care is around 28 percent of the federal budget, defense 21 percent. Medical spending no longer cures the sick; it’s the take for insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital rackets. The US spends more per capita on health care than any other nation (36 percent more than second-place Switzerland) but quality of care ranks well down the list.
In education there is the same gap between per capita spending (the US ranks at or near the top) and value received, in this instance as measured by student performance. What’s paid is out of all proportion to what’s received, especially at a time when computer and communications technology should be driving down the costs of education across the board.
Indoctrination factories formerly known as schools, colleges, and universities dispense approved propaganda. For students, higher education is now on the government-sponsored installment plan. There’s a litany of excuses why Johnny, Joan, Juan, Juanita, Jamal and Jasmine can’t read, compute, or think, but lack of funding and student loans don’t wash. Education dollars fund teachers’ unions, their pensions, administrators, and edifice complexes; learning is an afterthought. This vein will play out as the pensions funds, and the governments that have swapped promises to fund them for educators’ votes, go bankrupt. Probably around the same time as the student loan bubble pops.
Money itself has become a faith-based construct, a strip mining operation jointly owned by the government, the central bank, and the banking cartel it supports. Replacing gold with paper promises, monetizing debt, interest rate suppression, inflation of the money supply and the central bank’s balance sheet, macroeconomic meddling, maintenance of a bankers’ cartel, and insider dealing within the cartel have immeasurably increased the wealth and power of the entire banking complex.
Twenty trillion dollars in debt, two-hundred-plus trillion in unfunded liabilities, and an economy that has barely cruised above stall speed for eight years are core samples indicating the mine is exhausted. The tailings dam has sprung visible leaks. However, the townspeople below the dam remain willfully oblivious to the danger.
Recognizing realty and doing something about it are hallmarks of mental toughness, once considered a virtue. Now, in various tangible and virtual sanctuaries against facts and logic, the demand is made for reality to conform to the delusions of those who refuse to confront it. In the safe space between their ears, the only danger is someone warning of danger.
Lower even than the level of mental fortitude is physical toughness. When the dam breaks, the obese, opiated, otiose endomorphs resting their girths on couches across America will have no chance of escaping the sludge, even with their motorized carts. President Kennedy christened the President’s Council on Physical Fitness to address what he saw as a soft and flabby America. Fifty years later, America is exponentially softer and flabbier—physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Most Americans are in no condition to handle the emotional and physical stresses crises will bring.
It’s viciously ironic that many of them will look to the strip miners for salvation. A captive government that has turned America into a field of rackets, its string-pullers extracting power and wealth while ordinary people have seen their incomes stagnate, their meager savings dwindle, and opportunities shrink, is somehow going to make financial and economic catastrophe all better.
In one sense Hillary Clinton’s use of the term “deplorable” was unfortunate, in that it implies that the strip miners care enough about the townspeople to deprecate them. They don’t. The townspeople have had their uses, but they’re expendable once the mine is played out. Let someone else worry about pulling them from the sludge, or just leave them buried. The strip miners chose America first because it had the richest vein, now exhausted. The strip miners will move on to other, albeit less lucrative, lodes. That is what is meant by globalization.
WHO’S EXPENDABLE?
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
Pingback: Strip Mining the World, by Robert Gore | Southern Nation News
“16 year war? Are you daft? This “war” is the product of the Reagan presidency and has been waged by both the US and its proxy’s non stop, since at least 1982. Remember the USS New Jersey shelling Lebanon? Because I assure you that Islam does. We have been at war in the mid east under EVERY administration since 1946. Clinton started bombing Afghanistan in, what? 1992? But Truman sent the 82AB into Lebanon in 1958. We occupied north Africa (until M. G. kicked us out in 1968) The things that you rail about are as old as man, and the US has been doing them since G. Washington ordered the army to exterminate the Indians along the upper Hudson river . Small pox in the blankets? Anybody? The “Wars of Imperial expansion” (he shakes his fist in outrage) you rail about are the history of human kind. Rome ? Sparta? Persia? Ring any bells? You need to try some serious perspective. Stop believing that government is supposed to be mans friend and helper.(FYI that’s your dog) You’ll live longer and enjoy your coffee more.
LikeLike
Ray. He doesn’t think for a minute the Govt. is our friend. Did you even read what he was saying. You remind me of someone who is madly in love with the sound of his keystrokes.
Bob. Otiose Endomorphs? Just when I think you can’t out do “Political Transvestite You catch me napping. That’s the funniest yet.
LikeLike
Frank,
Thanks, glad you liked the article. Holly O. says to tell you that she wishes you well.
LikeLike
Holly O wishing me well. I thought she wan’t pleased with my comment. You can give her my email if she wants it.
I’m on chap. 14 of golden pinnacle. Really enjoying it, hard to put down but I’m milking it. Some great stuff in there. I get the sense that a huge part of you is in there. Some surprising similarities to me in there too with the war and the gambling but it was never the money for me, just the thrill of the chase.
LikeLike
Glad you like TGP. Some me in there. Definitely my best book so far. I just got going again on part 2, tentatively titled The Gray Radiance, the one with the Vietnam section. The disfigured beggar inspired several paragraphs. I’ll send them along if you want to look at them. I’d be interested in your comments.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on The way I see things ….
LikeLike
Pingback: Strip Mining the World, by Robert Gore – Dirt People
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World | Wall Street Karma
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World – Earths Final Countdown
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World | ProTradingResearch
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World | StockTalk Journal
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World | GEOECONOMIST
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World - BuzzFAQs
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World | NewZSentinel
Where are the heroes so wonderfully depicted in the Westerns of days gone by: we need them now: http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/11/who-cares-about-art-scene-when-you-can.html
LikeLike
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World | Zero Hedge - Tradebuddy.online Stockmarket news - Forex - News - Realtime market Data- World News - Trading Ideas
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World - Telzilla
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World – Independent News Media
The description of expenditure versus benefit received is quite correct and upsetting.
LikeLike
Pingback: Strip-Mining The World | It's Not The Tea Party
Excellent metaphor Mr. Gore…
As long as the Rich define our reality, we’re screwed.
But, the answer was given to us long ago, and we can’t see it, because too many want to be like their ‘betters’… rich.
We must ‘turn the tables on the money changers’. This can take many forms, but, in the 1870’s, they hanged bankers… I like that the best, after having lived under their tender mercies for many decades… I know, for a fact, at the top. they are crooks.
It is up to men to deliver justice in this world, not the appearance of justice, or Just Us.
Politics cannot fix it, when we are in The Kabuki dance in the theater of the damned…
LikeLike
If 25 million Americans withdrew their funds from financial institutions and stopped paying their debts, they’d bring the entire system to its knees within weeks. See “Revolution in America.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Amen, Robert! “Working on it, Boss!”
Had one hellava exchange with all the parasites holding some of my wealth in 401-Ks, IRAs, Pensions, C/Ds, and bank accounts. Each of these vermin were furious that I elected to take out funds “they” were in charge of!
On the other side of the coin–“Debts,” I had stepped on a rusty nail in my barn and went to the local ER. Some amalgamated MD imported from Paki-India-China kept repeating: “Where hurt?” Told the dude in perfect English: “Gimme a tetanus shot and I’m off.” Finally that was done. Weeks later, received a hospital bill for thousands of USD; sent the outfit a M.O. for $100 with a note: “You want more–sue me–that will allow me to counter-sue you.” Never heard back from ’em. Maybe they can’t read English in their accts payable section–BUT, they did cash the M.O.
Keep up the FINE ANALYSIS, Robert!
We here in “fly over land” are staying well away from the tailings pile dam, already a waste of desert sand– a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, it is moving its slow thighs, while all about it, wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
This rough beast, now slouching, will come soon enough and the darkness will drop.
LikeLike
Thank you. Keep fighting!
LikeLike
Centurion.
The exchange with the parasites brought back memories. My late wife was strip mined by a “nice young man” from her brokers office during the dotcom collapse. When I insisted he give her the remainder and he swallow any fees or taxes he turned into monster. Law me as an ugly red headed step child demanding an inheritance. A cheap ambulance chasing lawyer and an impoverished widow sob story got it done.
Hell hath no fury like a scorned broker.
LikeLike
Pingback: Strip Mining the World « Financial Survival Network
Pingback: Collapse Media Spectral Analysis | Loki's Revenge
Robert,
Went Galt years ago, when I learned that management was a bunch of lying bastards. If you work for a Big Corporation long enough, and rise high enough, eventually, you will face ‘The Test’. It is a test of your soul, you will be asked to do something illegal, immoral, or just downright unethical, in my case, to lie to my employees about the IPO, and stock options (that management had arranged to get the lions share of for almost no cost.) I refused, telling them to “do your own lying”. I was told I was not a ‘Team Player’. My response was “ya’ll are a bunch of (expletive deleted) lying thieves. I was demoted, and moved off into a closet(literally!) in the sewer plant.
When I left I took all my knowledge with me, and, my money. Converted it all to gold in 2005… yeah, it was about 425 / oz… wife thought I was nuts. Now, she’s a believer.
I went from being a robotic/automation engineer, to a blacksmith…
Much happier. And, I kept my soul.
LikeLike
Your last two sentences: priceless.
LikeLike
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
H. L. Mencken
LikeLike
I know I am.
LikeLike
Bob.
I’d be glad to look it over, privileged even.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Today,s Thought and commented:
Every word a truth.
LikeLike
How easy people have been had.
LikeLike
Pingback: Strip Mining the World, by Robert Gore | STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC | Starvin Larry
Comparing government to strip mining severely impugns the reputation of strip mines.
LikeLike
[…] Strip Mining the World – Robert Gore […] […] by Robert Gore consecutive Line Logic […]
LikeLike
Pingback: Strip Mining the World – The Dead Messenger Post