A December 2017 statement from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights notes that, while the US manages to spend "more [money] on national defence than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined", US infant mortality rates were, as of 2013, "the highest in the developed world".
The Special Rapporteur provides a barrage of other details from his own visit to the US, during which he was able to observe the country's "bid to become the most unequal society in the world" - with some 40 million people living in poverty - as well as assess "soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction".
alJazeera
Trump base chorus: Then why does everyone want to live here, huh?
To be sure, rampant drug use and abuse is hardly surprising in a society in which money and profit have so superseded human life in importance that people often literally cannot afford to live.
Some, however, choose alternate methods of escape from the brutality of reality - as is hinted at by a 2018 study from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that indicates skyrocketing suicide levels across the country.
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Of course, it's not just bodies and communities that the US brand of capitalism is destroying at home and abroad; it's also the planet itself. Overconsumption, unbridled contamination, and resource exploitation have put us on a fast track to a "point of no return", as climate scientists have warned.
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After all, now that the oceans and other essential earthly accessories have effectively become plastic, it will be rather difficult to convert them back into non-plastic form - particularly when the global capitalist elite have wholeheartedly embraced the system's self-destructive logic and apparently don't mind leaving their progeny to deal with the impending apocalypse.
This is even truer since the current leader of the so-called "free world" is the man who previously denounced climate change as a Chinese hoax.
In a December post on the Verso Books website, Ashley Dawson - author of Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change - reviews some of Donald Trump's contributions to the Earth's devastation by "hyper-capitalism", such as "efforts to criminalise environmental protest".
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"[E]xtractivist policies adopted during the second year of his reign of environmental terror included rolling back vehicle fuel economy standards, dismantling rules limiting methane pollution, and jettisoning safety rules governing offshore drilling operations", among other feats.
And while Trump's assault on the environment is mirrored by ultra-right counterparts across the globe - like Brazil's new president Jair Bolsonaro, who has pledged to put an end to the Amazon rainforest as we know it - Dawson stresses that the "ideological opening" for such leaders was facilitated internationally by "centrist and even leftist governments… that remained wedded to fossil capitalism over the last couple of decades".
It bears emphasising, too, that, in the US, enthusiastic bipartisan support for war - a pillar of the imperialist enterprise - translates into not only mass death for people on the receiving end of bombs and drone attacks, but also large-scale environmental poisoning. As Newsweek observed in 2014, the US Defence Department is one of the top polluters on the planet.
Newsweek, July 25, 2014:
The US Department of Defence is one of the world’s worst polluters. Its footprint dwarfs that of any corporation: 4,127 installations spread across 19 million acres of American soil. Maureen Sullivan, who heads the Pentagon’s environmental programmes, says her office contends with 39,000 contaminated sites.
Camp Lejeune is one of the Department’s 141 Superfund sites, which qualify for special clean up grants from the federal government. That’s about 10% of all of America’s Superfund sites, easily more than any other polluter. If the definition is broadened beyond Pentagon installations, about 900 of the 1200 or so Superfund sites in America are abandoned military facilities or sites that otherwise support military needs.
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During the 1960s and 70s [Camp Lejeune] was host to a grim dance of miscarriages, stillbirths and inexplicable postnatal deaths
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As early as 1981 officials at the base were told that the drinking water consumed by the base’s 100,000 or so residents each day was full of what toxicologists call “methyl-ethyl death.” But the first batch of groundwater wells was not shut down until 1984. The base became a Superfund site in 1989, but even today, the full extent of the camp’s contamination is not known. America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) isn’t even sure how many people have been poisoned by the water, though estimates suggest it was consumed by a million people.
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Kevin Shipp was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency at Camp Stanley, near San Antonio’s heavily polluted Kelly Air Force Base. He and his family lived at the base, which is believed to be a weapons storage facility, for two years starting in June 1999.
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“My children were bleeding from their noses, vomiting, had severe headaches and strange rashes on the exposed areas of their skin,” Shipp later wrote. “My wife became bedridden with headaches so severe, she had to be placed on morphine... I began to have burning in my lungs... and was losing my short-term memory.”
In 2002, Shipp left the CIA and sued his employer for placing him in a mould-ridden house. The case was eventually dismissed on the basis of the State Secrets Privilege. Shipp described Camp Stanley as a “toxic mess”. Not only is it littered with ageing munitions, but its water was poisoned in a fashion strikingly similar to Camp Lejeune’s. “Frankly,” Shipp said, “they don’t care.”
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“Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,” said John D Dingell, a soon-to-retire Michigan congressman, who served in the Second World War. “Lejeune is one of many.” They form a sort of toxic archipelago across the land from McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento, California, where radioactive waste was found, to the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod, poisoned by explosives and perchlorate, a rocket fuel component that is a major Pentagon pollutant.
Newsweek
Support our troops was, I believe, the right-wing battle cry after 9/11.
Today, Camp Lejeune is a tidy base of red-brick buildings and thick groves of pine. Occasionally, one sees vistas of the New River, which opens into a bright blue bay. The base is home to a rare variety of woodpecker, and the Venus fly-trap. The place looks ordinary, pretty in places. It is like a body whose wounds have healed, though the scars are still visible. Officials there say proudly that the water is now probably the cleanest in the nation. Solar panels have already been installed on 2,000 homes, improbably making Camp Lejeune one of the largest residential communities in the nation to use solar energy. Even more improbable, earlier this year Camp Lejeune won an environmental restoration award from the Pentagon, beating bases across the services.
In 2012, Jerry Ensminger and Mike Partain won a victory when President Barack Obama signed the Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act, which is supposed to ensure that those sickened by Lejeune water get medical treatment.
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Ensminger said the process has been like “pulling teeth”. He wasn’t exaggerating. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled against 25 North Carolina residents who sued an electronic firm for contaminating their well water, a ruling that could make it harder for Camp Lejeune lawsuits to proceed.
Well, maybe the new right-wing Supreme Court will take a more polluter-friendly stance.
In so many ways.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
