I Hope I’m Wrong but…
4 min readAug 28, 2018
- One of the biggest failures of our intelligence agencies was foreseeing the overnight collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. They were so busy playing spy versus spy and counting which tanks and missiles were at what part of the global chessboard that they couldn’t see the entire fabric of a vastly overstretched military empire tearing at the seams. This is bureaucratic myopia at its finest. A large part of the failure of the USSR was the channeling of much of the resources of the nation into a bloated military-industrial complex that ideologically was both “defending mother Russia” and getting ready for a people’s revolutionary war against the scourge of capitalism. While not as lopsided as North Korea is today, partly due to the amount of resources at their disposal, Russia had basically become a third world nation with nuclear missiles and a giant military leach sucking the lifeblood out of the country while waiting for a world war that could never happen due to the suicidal nature of going against their decades old enemy, namely us, the good ol’ U.S. of A.
- When the USSR went down, after the initial shock wore off, we took no time breaking our own arms while patting ourselves on the back for bringing about their demise by outspending them in the biggest clusterfuck of an arms race in the history of mankind, so far. A B-rated actor with Alzheimer’s was venerated as some lone gun cowboy taking down the evil commie scum all by himself, which even if you believe that propagandist bag of horseshit is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of cold warriors who played a nearly fifty year long, life or death game. In the immediate undertow of losing the main reason for us to maintain the greatest standing military in the history of the world, some scaling back began. Bases were cut, troop strength was allowed to diminish and lucrative contracts were scaled back or diverted. With the cuts in military spending and a slight increase on taxes on the wealthiest upper echelon of our society, the country saw the largest period of economic growth since the decade just after WWII. But, owing to maybe a glitch in our software, some fundamental flaw in the very nature of our being, we can’t have too much of a good thing.
- Following the jiffy-pop demise of the raison d’être for our massive and similarly overstretched military-industrial complex, the entrenched powers that be scrambled to find new enemies. China was thrown out and market tested. Sure they have a large army that they also love to parade in giant nationalist spectacles and use for internal security. But, we sent them much of our industry and jobs and kind of need them to fill our stores with cheap shiny things for people to obsess over. Also, at the time, and even today, we could snuff them out even quicker than the USSR at the height of its game. Say what you want about our military, but it still is the biggest baddest kid on the block. Plus, if China wanted to fuck us, they could do it without firing a shot in anger by merely nationalizing all of the outsourced American industries in their country and not buying our treasury bills at auction and/or demanding to be paid in Euros instead of dollars.
- At the turn of the new century, following a peaceful coup d’état by a family knee deep in the both the intelligence agencies and arms and oil industries, the biggest gift ever was bestowed upon the military in the form of blowback known today as 9/11. The global war on terror gave the military the green light to begin its biggest expansion since the demise of the USSR. Seventeen years, two major combat theaters, and half a dozen other proxy wars later, we are now in a continual state of war. End times idiots prattle on about an upcoming WWIII style apocalypse like it’s not already here. We are already locked into a world war. We have over a thousand military bases and various CIA black sites around the world and are engaged in some form of warfare, cold or hot, on every continent except Antarctica. And, if you don’t know this already, this shit is expensive. It’s the real reason we can’t have nice things like bridges that don’t collapse, high speed trains, socialized medicine and top notch public education free to all through the university level.
- Now, when you combine the burden of a military that spends over 50 percent of our federal budget with a hamstrung body of politicians completely controlled by corporate interests whose goal is to escape and evade any and all taxation and regulation possible, to the point of funding grass roots sociopaths with a stated goal of causing gridlock at the very pinnacles of power, you have the recipe for this country to collapse just as quickly and without warning in nearly the same manner as the USSR in 1991. The wonder of capitalism is that we’ve been able to keep this pig afloat for longer than our ideological nemesis, but the various factors in play today, all of which are so full to the brim with both greed and hubris that they are now operating against each other makes this collapse seem almost eminent and unavoidable as will be the cries of “Why didn’t anybody see it coming?”
