The way this video from April 2010 unfolds is deeply disturbing, especially considering it happened to a citizen who was entirely correct about this session of the Hawaii State Legislature breaking the law (by not maintaining a separation between church and state). What’s more they then charged him with disorderly conduct, yet he wasn’t breaking any law by speaking out non-violently in the senate chambers. Even the courts agreed with him. This is disturbing for two reasons. Firstly, occurrences like this are hypocritical in the extreme, coming from a nation (USA) who invade other countries without UN authorisation, and retrospectively take the moral high-ground by thrashing around “news” articles demonising religious (non-Christian) extremists for trampling civil-liberties, in a last-minute attempt to drum up sympathy for their illegal “wars” when no OBLs or WMDs magically materialised on request. The second disturbing aspect is that this is yet another example of how heavy-handed violence from authorities is becoming almost a daily occurrence in the US recently, especially in the years since Bush Jr staged his little Cowboys & Indians farce (which is surely no coincidence). It seems a new kind of slavery is rearing its ugly head across the “Land of the Free”…
My guess is that the reason we are seeing a general increase in wild and erratic behaviour from authorities in the USA is because the fundamentalists are panicking, as their beloved hegemony is now sinking fast – due to the Euro becoming a logical alternative for the international reserve currency. This spells disaster for the US because their empire has primarily been built on the seldom-mentioned fact that (due to the US historically being the prime consumer of oil), US dollars have been the international reserve currency since 1945. This has allowed the US to continually spend far more than it earns while the rest of the world has had to earn far more than it spends. What’s really silly is that logical solutions (which could still avoid the US economy belly-flopping into the gutter overnight) have been floating around for a long time now, like installing a dual or triple OPEC oil transaction currency standard (US dollar, Euro, Yen/Yuan) as proposed by William R Clark back in January 2003. Even countries less sympathetic with the US want the US economy not to fail catastrophically, because they know the ripple effect would cause a global recession/depression (far worse than the present one) as a consequence. The problem is that the neocon Axis of Authority firmly embedded at Washington (visibly, and insidiously) will never let that happen, even if Obama begged them, ultimately because they’re greedy and myopic. They’d rather take their country down in flames than let go even an inch of their beloved yet illusory status as “Economic Superpower”.
It’s interesting too that religious fundamentalists in the US are showing the worst lack of self-restraint. I would have thought that they should follow their own advice about “trusting in God to provide”, if they really believed what they were saying, yes?
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