In America today, so much crisis, so much pain, so much power wielded. They’re related by being, so far, mysterious, without ready explanation. This mystery itself contributes additional pain – “how can this be happening to me, my family, my country?” This question is now chronic. I believe that by those of us who’re among the less debilitated by pain, fortunately with some surplus energy, this chronic question – how can this be happening? can, and should, be probed – investigated.
Should we not treat a crisis as a mystery, one demanding the question, “How did we get here?” For example, how did we, the planet, arrive at the crisis of a years-long pandemic viral infection, Covid`19, like nothing seen since The Plague of 1346-1353? If no accident,[1] then what or who was responsible? This question typically is murky, although not impossibly so.
How did the US arrive at the crisis of a Capitol Riot needing 1,000 arrests of previously non-violent citizens? If not inexplicable,[2] where’s responsibility lie for this unique fiasco?
How did the US arrive at the twin addiction crises of Internet addiction and opiod addiction? Can one of these addictions help produce the other?
How did we arrive at the crisis of price rise overcoming people’s ability to buy necessities of survival (the “inflation” crisis)?
Pain debilitates. Each crisis debilitates. Some are spared debilitation, and those privileged in this way, I think, owe a responsibility to brothers and sisters who are wounded – a responsibility to investigate. How did we get here? For example, when a mother cursed her son, an adult, and threatened “you’ll sleep on the ground.” And the son shouted back, dissing his mother. Here, mustn’t pain have been the cause? Pain, if not from personal crisis, then from accumulated social-economy crises that have made mere survival tenuous? Where’s responsibility lie for this painful episode? Not entirely with those participating in it. That is, I believe it can’t be individuals by themselves who have the power to produce such bleak and arduous life situations.
Power players responsible for helping bring about painful lives, the record shows, include profit-takers who endanger your kid. These include rent profiteers who contribute to a person facing lack of housing. Power players include regulators who allow onto the market new products (such as the opioid Fentanyl) with no thought of social consequences unintended but critical (such as a California police-union official caught in 2023 importing Fentanyl-like opioids bought through her police-station compuer). Dangerous power players also include the electronics executives whose unregulated products are now known to have become painfully disordering to masses of America’s young people.
In seeking to responsibly respond to powers that help produce needlessly painful lives, this Web site presents material sober enough to be not dismissible outright – having cogence, making sense – but which material is enough “para-noic”[3] to draw thinkers, perhaps especially young thinkers – away from thought that is conventional concerning the string of crises that has marked American society during recent years. If wool is being pulled over one’s eyes about the sources of pain-inducing crises, these essays aim and claim to push wool back off.
Because pain often begins when a feeling of peace ends, crises are treated here that are occurring in nations offshore where US military might backing investments by corporations poses the possibility of shooting warfare. In each of the “country” crises probed on this Site, this specter looms.
[3] Literally, “outside-mind.” Think of “thinking outside the box.”
Unquestionably, ability on a huge scale – power – is entailed in being responsible for any huge crisis.
On this site, “power” refers to an entity I am calling CorpGov (short for “corporations served by government”), meaning roughly the largest corporations in the largest industries – the oil industry, the arms industry, the tech industry, the pharma industry, the cosmetic industry served in their work by a range[3] of government sectors. For crisis after crisis, the record shows benefit to some or all of these industries. That benefit represents motive for causing crisis.
I think, when one asks, Why the rise in the US suicide rate? Why the rise in the US divorce rate? Why the drop in US “quality of life?”[4]
The US places 91st and 97th respectively in basic education and basic healthcare. This fact reflects a general population grossly under-served. The US places 1st in “university quality” and “medical technology,” which reflects an elite population served to the highest degree.
When a parent struggles but fails to secure her child basic education or basic healthcare, what could be more painful?
Few any longer call this widespread pain an accident, so it remains to fix responsibility. The record suggests blaming CorpGov, as it ever-more-strongly promotes corporate interests and continually cuts services to people.
Middle-aged American whites outside big cities are dying faster than they used to.[5] For this group, between 2013 and 2015 the death rate uncharacteristically rose,[6] with most premature deaths coming from suicide, opiate overdose (“accidental poisoning”), or abuse of hard liquor (“liver disease”).
Researchers noted “epidemic deaths of despair.”[7]
Preventing such despair decades ago, government provided support programs for families pursuing the American Dream. American families were strong enough with that government support to allow family members sufficient psychological security – up until around 1965, when government began to cut support programs for American families[8] in favor of subsidies for major industries – oil, mining, and corporate agriculture.
With this, even in times without any marked crisis common people were already subjected to the pain of decreased economic insecurity. But the record suggests that America’s recent string of crises, by ultimately benefiting corporations as served by government, is making the common person’s lot newly and increasingly painful.
[4] US News & World Report, September 11, 2020
[5] Brookings Institute, March 23, 2017
[6] In contrast to a decreasing death rate for Americans overall. US News and World Report, September 11, 2020.
[7] Foreign Relations, February 3, 2020; also cf. Stein et al, “The Epidemic of Despair Among White Americans: Trends in the Leading Causes of Premature Death, 1999–2015.” American Journal of Public Health, 2017
[8] Saying that “the free market” provided families enough opportunity to thrive. Here, government presupposed a “trickling” – of corporate wealth – “down” to regular people.
Investigative reporting has occupied me for 34 years, much of it on newspapers, during a time when such work has gone from normal to rare societally. Publishing investigative books continues this vocation for me. These books aim at broader and deeper accounts of events and situations so dire as to be called calamities, or crises (e.g., the TWA 800 bombing, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Capitol Riot, the Ukraine war).
A current hope and goal for me is a bonding of American dissenters from the political left to American dissenters from the right – a close look at dissent in the US, which is what I encourage, reveals a common distaste for us common persons forced to live below an elite of corporations that are served by government. To this end, I have had both education[1] and an opportunity to unlearn parts of it that don’t fit the world we live in.
[1] MA Philosophy, BA Journalism, San Francisco State University; Paralegal Certification, Boston University
These slim volumes, easy reads, concise, punchy, and revealing, flesh out skimpy facts given in mainstream reports on dire matters and dismiss the doctrinal spin that customarily is put when matters of grave concern to power are reported.
This book is a vigorous effort to answer the question, "How did we get here?"—a question that troubles virtually every American over the age of fourteen. How did America lose power in the world? How did American democracy become undermined? The press industry, who once would have been charged with answering this question, is not—according to Phelps—currently capable of doing so. Closely read, this book allows an answer to emerge to this compelling American question.
Get a new perspective on targeting those deliberately contributing to global warming, such as large corporate interests in oil, crime, and real estate. The book reveals how profits are being made by accelerating global warming and shows that Big Oil, Organized Crime, and Big Real Estate are legally liable for planetary harm. Additionally, it offers a revised history of Western corporate exploitation of foreign natural resources in central Africa and MesoAmerica, crucial to global warming acceleration.
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