This past week for an evening in North Carolina I had the pleasure of speaking briefly with Medea Benjamin and hearing her opine about Ukraine to an audience at a local church. A petite, elegant, straight talking Jewish lady, now 70, who for decades has been at the forefront of trying to explain to far more “average” and largely perplexed American multitudes and the world at large just what the U.S. government has been doing — criminally — across the globe but especially in the Middle East with its war machine over and over again, especially in the last 30 or so years but beginning primarily elsewhere Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.

In this century alone the U.S. has already spent and wasted over $8 trillion dollars on making wars, killed millions of innocent people, virtually bankrupted the Treasury and turned the U.S. financial system into the largest Ponzi scheme ever. This is evident where, like soon, the government must raise the debt ceiling, a much repeated action, yet again simply to pay off outstanding Treasury debt by issuing newly minted debt with printed “money”. If ever a U.S. President was correct in warning about the future, Dwight Eisenhower was the man in 1960 when he left the White House saying that the Military Industrial Complex, back then not nearly as vast as it is today, could become a danger to America at the very least.

Medea Benjamin came to North Carolina for a day to speak factually about the proxy U.S. war on Ukraine. She explained exactly what has been happening, and why, and especially that the U.S. Neocons actually started planning this proxy war a decade or so ago when it became evident that Vladimir Putin was pulling Russia up by its bootstraps and reviving at least a shadow internally and economically of what Russia had been when the Soviet Union was strong enough to limit to some degree if not grossly challenge the U.S. as the world’s dominant nation.

Benjamin’s core message has always been the futility of U.S. wars except for a small minority of people in the military and in corporations that feed the monstrous military complex and get rich in the process. She was asked by one person in her audience whether one of the  biggest reason the U.S. has embarked on so much militarism this century is because the U.S. economy over the last 30 years or so has become so relatively hollowed out and de-industrialized that in many respects the “economy” has simply become largely one of military activity and production of arms by companies like Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin plus all the countless smaller firms whose only viable businesses have been to support militarism? Her answer to this was more or less in the affirmative. And it’s worth remarking that one reason the U.S. economy has been failing slowly this century is because U.S. corporations offshored much of its former industrial might to other countries with far cheaper labor, especially China, which in just a few decades has created something like a billion-strong middle class of sorts out of poverty.

For those majority billions of people outside the West whose disgust with the U.S. has been rapidly ascending for years, they have witnessed a China that has done relative wonders for its citizens and others without policies that amount to gross parasitism (and the afflictions of violence and crushing sanctions and, yes, arrogance and outright theft) that by now have have isolated the U.S. like never before and created enmity for the U.S. It’s a wonder Europe has not yet gone its independent way while the Bidenists have aimed to de-industrial Europe and make it more dependent on the U.S. But many Europeans are protesting except you don’t hear or see much about that in the Western media.

All the obvious reams of propaganda springing forth from the mainstream U.S. media condemning other countries like China and Iran and Russia for an alleged total absence of “democracy” must be a sad joke to well over half the world’s people. Because in fact the U.S. where criticism of Washington is widely manipulated and suppressed by the media, real “democracy” has become but a faint shadow of what existed 50 years ago in the U.S. when, for example, millions of people repeatedly protested (with eventual success) the madness of the Vietnam War and helped end it finally in 1975. Consider that arguably the finest economist in the U.S. and one if the country’s best minds, one Jeffrey Sachs who taught at Harvard and now presides at Columbia University, has become vehemently opposed the the U.S. proxy war on Ukraine and as a result stated this month that he can no longer place an op-ed article in a major U.S. newspaper like the New York Times or Washington Post.

Now, those Americans whose eyes are wide open like Medea Benjamin’s await sadly the dangerous denouement for decades of belligerent foreign policy: the further decline of U.S. economic and dollar dominance and financial bankruptcy that is now and is going to crush further most all Americans like never before. For the people of countries like Iran, who don’t necessarily want any innocent people anywhere “crushed”, there is at least the relatively pleasant prospect that with gathering inevitability the U.S. literally will be incapable of meddling and making or supporting wars that much longer. (It will have to start tending its own citizens more if it can.) As Julius Caesar exclaimed when he crossed the Rubicon and headed to Rome with a Roman Legion of soldiers under his command in 49 B.C.: “The die is cast”… in this current case, for a U.S. ultimately emasculated and on the ropes.

The extreme danger is that, in a fit of pique at evaporating fortunes, insane U.S. “leaders” in the government and the Pentagon will drag humanity into a third world war that will utterly dwarf the two in the last century and involve nuclear weapons.

No one anywhere with sensibility and some knowledge can possibly not be alarmed. And Biden’s and his administration’s insistence (and by many in the U.S Congress, too) on not negotiating an end to the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine is the certain spark. They believe a competitive Russia will be destroyed. 

For honest and concerned souls like Medea Benjamin who with great courage have tried to educate average Americans, Zelensky’s lionized recent visit to Washington, and the subsequent suggestion put forth to place a sculpted bust of Zelensky in the Capitol building as some sort of hero, has to be the apogee of Washington’s blighted mentality.

Zelensky is just as responsible, if not more responsible, for the destruction in Ukraine and hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Ukrainians. He could have brought the war to a halt last Spring, but then he was swayed not to negotiate an end by former British PM Boris Johnson and others in the U.S. and the E.U.