NATO Protects America’s Military Industrial Complex, Not Democracy.

There are only a few swigs of June remaining, but the dregs of it- taste brackish. There is a sense of ending despite being at the start of a new season. Optimism can’t take root in the economic and political soil made barren by neoliberalism. Yet, we can’t live without hope. So we get it where we can and prevent our spirits from becoming as arid as desert sand.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Zohran Mamdani's recent Democratic primary win in New York City to be the Party's candidate for their city’s mayoral election offers a small ray of light to an America darkened by fascism. But it will not be enough to shift the authoritarian cloud over the USA and the rest of the Western World. Nor will it be a start of a politics for the people. Neoliberalism, like cancer, isn't reformable. It can only be eradicated or will eventually kill the State.

Summer once promised respite and renewal and the chance to enjoy spare idle moments, but not anymore. Too many, too often and too terrible are all the crises we've met over these last years to get a reprieve from despair unless we come from the top-income earning class. Bit by bit, our centre can not hold. We are overwhelmed by personal grief, political collapse and existential terror from a genocide that the corporate news media and political class normalised out of personal greed and because they are adherents to a morally bankrupt ideology.

It’s not hope or optimism. But I am relieved that the current heat dome ventured away from my region this morning. When it was here, the day and night turned on a fiery spit of climate collapse. Temperatures hovered at the 40-degree mark as if I were nearer to Death Valley than the Canadian Shield.

I don’t know what I would have done without my small, portable air conditioner which kept my living room at a tepid, but survivable temperature while the rest of my apartment roasted like a car's interior broiling, on an Algarve asphalt parking lot in August.

Others aren't that fortunate. I often think about those who will perish this summer for want of a liveable temperature: the homeless, the elderly worse off than me, and the disabled. But few remember them. Deaths from extreme weather events, just like the deaths from Covid, Israel’s genocide and climate collapse, are marked under the ledger heading Shit Happens to the autocrats of neoliberalism.

The world is literally on fire because of Climate Change, which has fueled an age of extinction migration crisis and caused a collapse in the Western World's political systems. Yet, like COVID or our Genocide against the Palestinians, the politicians and news media class dropped the climate change emergency down a memory hole as if they were Winston Smith working at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's novel, 1984.

We ignore true existential threats like fascism, uncontrolled capitalism, Israel run amok, smouldering pandemics and the planet warming to unsustainable levels. Instead, we shake in our boots, terrified that Russia and China are on the verge of invading us. Could those two nations do anything more cruel to us than what capitalism already has done? Could they ignore the rule of law, decency and human respect any more than our current political leaders?

Yet the fear of Russia, China, and Islam does two things: it creates societal control through collective fear of an enemy, and it makes enormous money for those who provide the security for these bogus fears.

The recent NATO summit in Brussels was proof of this. There, political journalists regurgitated the talking points of arms manufacturers and generals. They all sold the news NATO members agreed to increase military expenditures to 5% of their GDP, which means each nation, must drastically reduce funding for social welfare programs. Yet the well-paid journalists, pundits and politicians sang in three-part harmony; that it was money well spent as it assured protection against invasion from Russia and China. NATO's. The Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte during the organisation's last meeting called Donald Trump, "Daddy," with all the obsequiousness of a member of Hitler's General Staff to the Fuhrer in 1941.

NATO isn’t there to protect democracy. It’s there to protect the billionaires and their assets. The agreement by NATO members to pay 5% of their GDP is tribute gold to America’s Military Industrial Complex. NATO is not a mutual defence organisation but a protection racket run like a mob shakedown for the benefit of the USA’s 1%.

This summer, we shouldn't look for hope to inspire us, but instead let our anger energise us.

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