A not-too-distant generation will write a similar epitaph as this one, for the West,
Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia Road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. --The Martyrdom of Man, by Winwood Reade (1871)
Eurangloland’s carnival barking, three-ring circus Vaudeville democracy continues to embarrass itself, and its neoliberal austerity on the 99% continues to lower standards of living, expectations, with a commiserate and accelerating decline in infrastructure.
Uncle Sam knew for three years that the Arecibo radio dish telescope in Puerto Rico could be fixed to prevent its collapse, and let it implode Talk about a modern-day allegory. Not to worry, China has built one bigger and better, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST).
US bridges are falling down. Here are the ten most deadly ones in the last 50 years. Even foot bridges are going down. There are 45,000 other death traps just like them, waiting to kill many more innocents. With them taking on 171.5 million crossings a day, you can bet on many more tragedies.
USA buildings collapsing? There are 24 pages of them on Wikipedia, although we can remove the Oklahoma City Federal Building Bombing false flag and the 9/11 false flag, so make that 22.
No, make that 23, there was a building collapse in Miami this summer, where almost 100 innocents died.
Energy grids? In this 2014 database, over 1,600 power outages were reported in the 15 previous years, across the United States . The year 2020’s list is long and there are already pages of them in 2021.
Look at the numbers of customers affected and the lengths of time. Together, just in the last 21 months, millions of Americans went without electricity for hundreds of hours. Some of it due is to severe weather, but it is widely accepted that the US energy grid is not being upgraded and winterized adequately. This was already well known in 2013 that it was decades-old problem.
And, how can we forget last year’s winter fiasco, when millions of Americans went without electricity and water for days. Hundreds of people died, while seeing their utility bills skyrocket and. This, because US energy suppliers prefer profits over updating their grids, so make the 99% pay. It’s the capitalist way.
There is much, much more. Uber-establishment Business Insider doesn’t hide the truth, as they give a damning report of all the infrastructure sectors.
Meanwhile, back in Sinoland, the Chinese people are leaving the West in infrastructure-and-technology dust, something I’ve reported on extensively over the years, and now maintaining an online database to keep up. I can speak from experience too. Going from China back to the USA is akin to leaping from modern, updated infrastructure and telecommunications, to a crumbling second world country.
It’s shameful, but that’s the difference between communist-socialist-anti-imperialist (CSAI) countries and global capitalism. Trump’s hoped for $1.5 trillion infrastructure program was dead in the water, since he was expecting the private sector to fund half. Capitalists have reptile brains and can’t think beyond next quarter’s profits and stock options. Infrastructure is a low margin, long-term investment that reaps mostly secondary and tertiary socio-economic rewards – in other words, for the benefit of the 99%. Ditto Biden’s much anticipated infrastructure bill. Lizard brains want double digit profits, period, and infrastructure can rarely offer that.
There are many other signs of Western decline, especially front-runner USA, nonetheless I’ll add one more: longevity.
The United States is seeing a rapid drop in life-expectancy. This decline has been going on for four years now, a sure sign of socio-economic cancer.
China’s life expectancy continues to climb and is now the same as US’s, 77.3 years.
The USA is in the lead, but the rest of the West is hot on its imperial heels. I know, because I’m living in France and watching Europe slowing cannibalize the wonderful socialism for the 99% it had for 50 years after World War II. It’s like an acid drip. We are being austeritized by the global capitalist trillionaire dictatorship, only 20 years behind the States.
So, break out the popcorn and your favorite fizzy drink, to watch the spectacle of Eurangloland’s collapsing empire on one screen, and then on the screen next to it, the dazzling spectacle of communist-socialist China rocketing into the 22nd century.
Compare Chinese headlines to the West’s. It’s like looking at the world from two different universes
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Author
Jeff J. Brown is the author of 44 Days (2013) and Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). In 2016 Punto Press released China Rising, Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations – The Truth behind Asia’s Enigmatic Colossus; and BIG Red Book on China (2020). Jeff is a contributing editor with the Greanville Post, Dispatch from Beijing. where he keeps a column, and is a Global Opinion Leader at 21st Century. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff writes, interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland,
Jeff grew up in the heartland of the United States, Oklahoma, much of it on a family farm, and graduated from Oklahoma State University. He went to Brazil while in graduate school at Purdue University, to seek his fortune, which whet his appetite for traveling the globe. This helped inspire him to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1980 and he lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East, China and Europe for the next 21 years. All the while, he mastered Portuguese, Arabic, French and Mandarin, while traveling to over 85 countries. He then returned to America for nine years, whereupon he moved back to China in 2010. Jeff is a dual national French-American, being a member of the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the International Workers of the World (IWW).
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