SuperPower
Superpower is a power that has no rivals, which can wield its influence at will, which can impose its own policies, its own agenda, it can go wherever it wants to go, and not worry about the consequences. United States is that superpower... or at least it used to be. The United States emerged from the cinders of World War II with its industrial base still intact and the only country with the atomic bomb.
It was without question the most powerful nation on Earth. What was done with this unprecedented power, and the effects it had on the republic and the rest of the world is the story of this documentary.
President Truman said, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." Why is United States the only remaining superpower? Immediately after WWII the United States began influencing and intervening in foreign governments to an extent and manner unparalleled in history. The National Security Act of 1947 fundamentally changed and reorganized the United States military establishments.
It created the National Security Council, and has since been used as the pretext for the extra-constitutional powers in the name of national security. In the time of fear during the Cold War the National Security Act also created the CIA as an Intelligence Gathering Agency but almost immediately the CIA expanded into a Clandestine Operations Agency.
Interventions abroad built up the US political, economic and military strength by seeking control over world resources and access to raw materials, markets and labor power in third world countries. Interventions in foreign governments became common practice. Claimed to be for reasons of national security these interventions were often solely for the benefit of multinational corporations.
Eisenhauer's 1961 farewell address warned Americans to safeguard their liberties but apparently that speech didn't have any significant effect on the American people... except it's quoted in almost every documentary.
The ONLY reason the US does all this stuff is because no other nation was able to get as powerful as we are! No nation with massive amounts of power have EVER acted differently. Why would you think this time would be any different?!?
Government is a tool of the powerful to exploit the less so. It has always been this way and it always will be! This is especially true in a Republic or a Democracy.
In a republic, legislators pay NO price for laws they pass. This gives them incentive to use government's exploitive powers to a much more damaging degree then was able to be done in the past.
You can clearly see this when the WORST case scenario for a modern politician is taken into account: He/she does not get re-elected and so gets a lifetime pension + full health care + a book deal explaining how (Fill in the blank scape goat.) was to blame for the ill effects of their law and last, but certainly not least, at $200k-1 mil a year consulting gig for the corporation that used them to pass the law that screwed over the citizens to their benefit in the first place!
This will come as a shock to most people, especially socialists, but this is how the world works. As I always tell people the powerful have always taken advantage of the less so. It is neither good nor evil, it’s simply natures way!
With all of this in mind the solution to all our problems with government is to become powerful yourself! Doesn't matter how you get that way be it by hook or by crook. Once you are powerful than you can make the rules.
If you’re looking for things that you personally can do to scale back the influence/wealth of the powerful (In the US, Russia, China or anywhere else.), AND at the same time increase your own, start with these 9 things:
1) Save at LEAST 10% of all you earn. If you are not saving at least that amount you are no better then a slave living for what your master gives you to eat. (Get yourself a free PDF copy of “The Richest Man in Babylon” Easiest book you’ll ever read on personal finance and is taught in parable so enjoyable to read as well.)
2) Keep your uninvested money in physical form. Either in Gold, Silver or, more pragmatically, physical currency (Remember in the most recent financial panics in the US (2008), Cyprus (2012), Greece (2015), etc. people were trying to get physical cash, not Gold or Silver.). If you must use the banking system only use Credit Unions or Savings and Loans. Keep only as much currency in it as you need for expenses over the course of a couple of weeks or a month tops (Business owners will need more because of tax and logistical reasons.).
3) If you’re a wage slave paying down a lot of debt talk to an attorney about bankruptcy. You are doing your patriotic duty by not repaying banks. Fractional reserve banking is fraud so don’t lose a single nights sleep if you don’t repay another cent of it!
4) Speaking of being a wage slave, if you’re getting a refund at the end of the year then you need to change your withholding status so you OWE at the end of the year. Why give the government a free loan for a year while you are paying 100+% from a payday lender?!?! Society trains you to be a slave, that doesn’t mean you actually have to be one!
5) When possible use physical cash when you purchase things. This helps by a) making it hard for the powerful to profile you and add you to their metadata. b) allows those so inclined to reduce the power of government by being “tax neutral”. c) supports the poor by making merchants obligated to accept cash through your free market choice to use currency, as opposed to governments tyrannically passing laws forcing merchants to accept it
6) Try keeping your patronage away from large entities, i.e. don't use Google use DuckDuckGo.com or some other small search engine that does not have massive power and also tries not to keep personal search information. You can easily switch out your tablet and cell phone search engines as well. For an Apple product just go to “Settings”>Safari>Search Engine. As I always say, " Whenever you centralize power it always helps the powerful." And yes I realize the irony of saying this on a Google owned platform. :)
7) Vote 3rd party, preferably one that pays lip service to freedom and liberty. Your vote doesn't really count anyway so you might as well make the powerful pay more for the privilege of owning you by adding the number of parties that they have to bribe (Remember action 6 above.)!
8) Copy and paste this list to any future posts that you make on Youtube, or anywhere else for that matter. The only thing better then you doing these things is getting OTHERS to do them as well.
9) Government is a tool of the powerful to exploit the less so. It has always been this way and it always will be. An example of this is how the powerful use the Government to enforce its guilds. The Federal Reserve (A banking cartel.) and the AMA (A medical cartel are two prime examples. ANYTHING that you do that reduces that power helps keep you free!
You can search the internet for other actions that you can take and if you have any good ones feel free to let me know. The first two are hands down the best an individual can do (Least effort and most effective.).
While it could have been and inside job it almost certainly wasn't done by our govt. but rather by some big business/banking/criminal interests outside of the govt. Why do I think this? Mostly because it actually worked and also because Americans don't need this to got to war any time anywhere in the world. The govt just does it, tells us a lie about it and everyone falls in line with one of those little flags you can buy for a buck. No need to destroy some valuable Realestate. Sheep don't need to see an actual wolf, they just need to be told one is around.
The best fishing doco i have seen in years!
It is alright until it gets to where they think 9/11 was an inside job. Come on - there is no way. And I like Chomsky but I think his remarks where taken out of context when he talked about how many people believe it was in inside job (that was just supposed to how much people distrust our government - he didn't say that HE shared that wacko theory).
and you spend how long research time exactly to arrive at that conclusion? Sounds very close to none at all
It should be seen by all, K-12 and higher.
Documentary makers... please... please stop using cheap synth sensationalist music in your work.... please... for all that is good in the world.
look what they did to my country they put the Islamic regime in power in iran .
"eminity of unfathomedable proportions" nice Quote
These people are all singing from the same hymnal. A kvetchfest like this sees nothing good in America and is essential an un-American and anti-American orgy of propagandic distortion. Here we have a recap of every error and infraction in US policy over the past 70 years.
Grenada was not an aggression. It was a reasoned, proportionate, and appropriate response to a 911 call from the neighborhood led by the Prime Minister of Dominica.
Democracy is nothing to worship. In any discipline or realm of activity, the majority is always wrong. Ask anyone in the stock market. We shouldn't be demonized for acting against "democratically-elected" regimes when such regimes go rogue. No mention of democratically elected Hitler, Mussolini, Castro and other mass murderers who claimed a democratic mandate. Too many times "One man, one vote" has turned out to be one time.
This choir of prosecutors would propose what remedy to government misconduct? Regime change? A purification of Marxist practices? A dictatorship of the proletariat under Noam Chomsky or Bernie Sanders? No thank you.
Nature abhors inequality. Empires always come to an end. The Roman empire ended as a dictatorship and eventually imploded. The British Empire needed two world wars and deaths of 50M+ to run out of money. US, as a Superpower, is the modern equivalent of an imperialist empire, an economic empire and like the East India Company, spearheaded by big corporations and businesses (and supported by friendly vassal states such as Britain, Germany and France). Using globalisation and other means, the US is "extracting" money out of the developing world, making it much more difficult for them to come out of poverty, but they are slowly doing so. How will the US empire eventually end, as it will like all other empires? Would it be a military dictatorship and implode/explode or do we come to our senses (and like the Vietnam War and the end of the USSR) change from within without shedding any blood? We would be too stupid to not choose the latter, for the sake of our children.
The human condition allows us to repeat the same mistakes we were previously warned about.
I'm 76 years old, and only 30 minutes of this causes me to feel pain inside my body. I've been lied to all my life, I remember being 17 and being indoctrinated into the USAF, I remember watching Korea and Vietnam, thinking then the same thing these scholars are saying now, watching it happen, Korea, the "Domino Theory", the fiction of 'Tonkin Gulf', the chemical bombing of Vietnam, it's all so very tragic, ...... but it's all so human too, isn't it? I try to conceive of power, I wonder why people want power, since I think of it as a burden, something that would interfere with a life of seeking to understand people and life, and even power itself. But at least now we know how it works.... When I think of power I see two faces in my mind's eye, that of David Rumsfeld and that of Richard Cheney. Such tremendous power these men have had!
We were raised in deceit, flag waving deceit. And it pervaded our lives, it bloated our egos. Eisenhower saw it coming, he saw it grow from the fact that we were the 'last country standing' following WWII, we had nearly all the industrial capacity of the world and were even building trucks and planes for the Russians in order to defeat Germany. How bizarre......
Will we see the end of our dominance as our currency is inflated into oblivion? Our paper money is increasing, exponentially please note, at a trillion dollars a year now. We are nearing the point when confidence in the dollar will be lost forever, when bondholders know they are getting less and less return on their investment, when saving vanishes. There will surely be turbulence..... No nation has ever experienced such debt as we possess, but neither a man nor a nation in debt owns it's future. Our people are painfully in debt as the dollar ceases to have value.....
I thank these scholars for speaking from their hearts and their minds, they live the pain of this knowledge every day of their lives......
Having dominance and worrying how to keep it is our downfall.
It certainly looks to me like 'survival of the strongest', and that we've not evolved enough to get beyond this struggle to the death for survival that has existed seemingly forever. It's so bizarre, we've got 177 military bases abroad, so just think of all the fuel required just to deliver the fuel required at these bases...... a staggering amount, and likely accelerating.
Amazing how naïve these academician's and Phd's were and still are. The majority of the American public don't give a damn about anything but themselves, and I would say that 80% of them don't know anything about what this documentary is talking about and wouldn't believe it if you told them.
Thats the sadness of the situation when they wake up it will be to late..........Clive
If I was one of those 80% maybe I would assume you are a know it all.How do we solve the problem?
Hmmm.......... "Superpower" indeed...... Let's see what a currency collapse will do to this 'superpower' of ours. Remember the 'British Empire"?
A country that can stage a Moon landing and con billions is capable of any thing they like...until the people wake up..look up you tube to the latest 2013 photo.proof the landing as staged.
"The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." I've like that quote for a long time now.
Of course when I was young, cool, & tragically hip no one could tell me that what my friends & I were doing wasn't "new & improved" or the first to do it. Whatever "it" was.
This video seemed a lot longer than it really was. Had the documentary's director collaborated with the makers of "Meth", things might have speeded up considerably.
The editing was choppy and segments bounced around randomly from one topic to another.
The crescendo of orchestral music booming dramatically in the background throughout the entire production, only added to my distress.
Chalmers Johnson's words impressed me the most. He was a walking encyclopedia on world events. It's a real loss that's he's gone now. I checked his credentials and was thoroughly impressed. The last book he wrote was in 2004, titled "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic." I'd like to explore his views further.
Then there was Noam Chomsky, my old favorite. My familiar face and trustworthy voice of reason.
These two fellows are the reason I watched this doc till the end.
2 hours is long, do you feel it's worth watching if one doesn't share your enthusiasm for Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky?
Yes. If this subject interests you.
It was a tad dry, and disorganised production, for my taste.
Seemingly valid points are made by people I'd never heard of, and their thoughts were interesting
I'd agree, though much of the subject matter has been covered extensively before, it's certainly worth a watch, as there's quite a few decent interviews (Dr Sergei Khruschev's contributions amongst others). That said, the editor could have trimmed the whole shebang down somewhat in an effort to get to the point. Also, while I am being a critical S.O.B, is it just me, or does anyone else find it a big fat turn off in a documentary when they find it necessary to shoot the narrator on a chroma key backdrop and then superimpose them over the stock footage? I mean it's not as disastrous as Alex Jones' voice invading something you'd settled down to watch after reading an interesting write up, but it's still really very cheesey.
It's not just you.
Watching docs about US policies could feel to some like kicking a dead horse.
I have to be in the mood to pay attention lately.
If I was hearing this content for the first time, it would be mind blowing.
I like Noam Chomsky too - sometimes he is hard for me to listen to - I feel compelled to watch this now -
Why is it hard for you to listen to him? Is it because his observations are brutally honest and depressing?
That's one reason why I don't make a habit of watching videos like this, on a regular basis! Lol
Not at all - I expect to hear what comes from him and agree on all fronts for the most part of what I have heard him address -
My complaint with Noam Chomsky is his run on concepts and digressions down different avenues of thought in the middle of an on going conversation about something different -
and the way the above statement came out is about the way i hear him at times -
especially if i just packed my bowl and i am two digits off center to begin with (:-O) -
Ha ha, I can see your point!
I live in my own little world of disjointed thoughts, firing off in all directions, so I don't bat an eye and usually fail to notice when others do it.
its called ADHD/ADD. I suffer from it. Bowls help, reading helps too. :)
This only started happening to me in my late 40's! I'm sure it has to do with menopause! (glad that's all over with). I'm reading lots and doing word puzzles :D
When I was a kid I daydreamed a lot but could focus if I wanted to.
Love Chomsky. In fact, he is about my top guy in this field of knowledge. Like bringmeredwine said, brutally honest but depressing, there is no window dressing or soft sugar coated inside. The man is a genius.
Oh I agree with you 100% - the thing i try to monitor is my one sided thinking (I try to remind myself) -
All the terrible things he says about the US and Israel etc. (not that he isn't a good American - I don't want to imply that - I feel the same way he does)
However - Lets not forget that No country has a monopoly on Corruption or Deceit - All of these country's and their "leaders" have corrupt people in there govt.
I know we are concerned with the US (if your from the US)
for instance The Native American - they slaughtered and wiped out each others tribes even killed the dogs women and children - so what happened they came up against a more powerful and advanced foe - so this is suppose to make the Anglo no good - maybe - but there no better - that's all I'm saying -
What you say "two wrongs don't make a right"
and to this I say, Your right, Amen