(Here is the written narrative from this week’s podcast for those who would rather read)
Fáilte
Welcome to The Village Oak Tree
I am your host, Terrance Ó Domhnaill.
Thank you for joining me once again.
I'm back from my long vacation out west, to which, if you're interested in learning about our adventures, read my four travel blogs posted on my Substack page.
During my long vacation, I thought some about the future of this show and I decided to redirect the show once again. I want to start focusing on the things that really matter to most folks. Poverty, homelessness, tyranny, how the warming climate is making all of that worse, and what we can try and do about it.
So come, sit you down somewhere comfortable for a bit and let me talk to you about some of the things I saw during my trip through the rural areas of the United states.
I want to start with a description of what I observed during my travels last month out through rural America. I will do my best to paint a picture for you of the poverty I saw everywhere across the country, and of some of the people I ran into along the way.
I don't plan on doing this all in one podcast but I want to spread this out over the next few weeks as I also want to talk about where all of that is coming from, and the anger we're seeing on the streets of the U.S.
Contrary to the stories we receive from the main stream media, the anger we're seeing erupt across the country is not just about the snatching of immigrants off the streets but a long fomenting anger over the failed economic policies of the U.S. government going back decades.
For years, the American people have had to put up with a government that wastes its taxpayer money on forever wars overseas with lies and deception. The primary people who benefit from these wars are the rich oligarchs who have been given multi-million dollar defense contracts, for which the elected politicians get kickbacks from in exchange for support for them. The so called, deep state.
Meanwhile, these same elected officials in the state and federal congresses seem to largely ignore the things that their constituents wanted from them when they elected them in the first place. You know, things like good roads to drive on, bridges that don't fall into rivers, train tracks that don't cause derailments and so on.
We've all been victims, in one way or another, to the lack of money being spent on our infrastructure in the U.S. for decades now. Roads so full of potholes that they're no longer safe to drive on at normal speeds. Overpass bridges that look like they're going to drop into the rivers and roads any minute. A couple have in the last few years, killing and injuring people. Then it takes several years to make the massive repairs that could have been taken care of in a summer if the politicians had spent our tax money when and where it was needed, instead of funding wars and regime changes, just so a handful of people could get richer.
Dick Cheney, the ex U.S. vice president under the idiotic George W. Bush comes to mind. His funneling of tax money to Haliburton was one of many crimes against the American people that was never prosecuted by the corrupt politicians of the time and never will be now. Kind of like how we never prosecuted Robert McNamara and his crew for the war crimes they committed in southeast Asia.
I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of all of the crimes against humanity that American presidents have committed in the name of combatting communism and the spreading of democracy to the world, whether the victims wanted it or not, since the late 19th century. All done with a big stick, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt when he dispatched his new great white fleet on a fourteen month around the world deployment on December 16th, 1907 to foster good will, with a big stick. A fleet which consisted of sixteen battleships. A really big stick.
This has been the American way since. Go around the world and force democracy down people's throats all in the name of saving them from tyrants. Look how that’s worked out over the course of the last hundred years?
Americans have never really liked going to war in other countries, save in WWII. That was different because we were attacked first. Although we were actively supporting Britain and China before Pearl Harbor, we were not officially at war with anyone. Does this seem a little familiar?
Think about that for a minute. Why did Al Qaeda attack the U.S. on 9/11? Because the U.S. has been meddling in other people's foreign affairs for decades, creating chaos across the world. Look at what Trump just did last weekend? To what end? The lies are starting to take a toll on Trump with the American people.
Why? For the money of course. At least money for the morbidly wealthy anyway. Remember, the U.S. did not have a permanent individual income tax levy until they passed the 16th amendment in 1913. Before then, the primary tax levy was paid by wealthy landowners and corporations. This was originally meant to benefit the taxpayers but you know what happens when you give a bunch of money to a bunch of spoiled rich kids with little to no oversight. They spend it on themselves, as we've seen through the decades.
Whenever the U.S. decided to meddle in other countries affairs, it has always been at the behest of the morbidly wealthy. Some corporation would have a financial interest somewhere, where that country didn't like them, so they would petition the U.S. government, via bribes to politicians, to interfere on their behalf. That's how the oil industry got its start in the middle east. The English, then the Americans, made deals with the Arabs in the early decades of the 20th century when oil started becoming a serious commodity. The Saudi corporation ARAMCO was the first of many of these interventions over the course of the 20th century, and into the 21st century right now in the pursuit of oil.
Why do you really think Israel is going after all of its neighbors? Huge oil and gas deposits off the coast of Lebanon and Gaza. To quote an old proverb from the last century, "He who controls the oil, controls the world." In Syria, their after the water for their new settlements in their mission to create that biblical "Greater Israel".
As so many people have pointed out in the media over the last couple of years, Israel is just the attack dog for the west. Most pointedly, the United States. Israel gets control of the oil and gas under and around Gaza, and now, Lebanon as long as the U.S., and to a lesser degree, western Europe, get first dibs on the sale of said oil contracts. Israel gets rich from these fossil fuel corporations, the U.S. gets richer by having exclusive rights to all of this fossil fuel, and by extension, Europe gets the leftovers.
Iran has a lot of oil reserves and the infrastructure to process it and sell it. The west wants it. That's the bottom line. But the U.S., under pressure from its voters, doesn't want to send any of their own troops to secure Iran's oil systems, like they tried to do in Iraq back in 2003. They would rather expend the IDF to do their dirty work and come in after it's all over to take what's left.
How does this all affect the average American, and by extension, the average Canadian and European citizens? All of this chasing after oil is bankrupting countries left and right. We're watching in real time, economies implode across the west. Countries like Germany, France, Britain, and a handful of others who've tied their fortunes to the EU and the U.S., are fighting to keep their countries financially afloat.
Unfortunately, their going about this the wrong way. Instead of making fair trade deals, the governments are inventing boogeymen to scare their citizens into giving up more of their hard earned money to pay for more weapons. Again, the only ones making any money off of any of this, are the arms manufacturers. They're laughing all the way to the international banks, where they can dodge having to pay their fair share of taxes.
Meanwhile, countries like the U.S. are dealing with an ever increasing amount of homelessness and food insecurity in more and more communities across the land.
I saw a lot of this during my travels recently and what we read or watch in our news media feeds doesn't tell us anything close to the reality on the ground.
I personally observed little towns and villages across America's rural landscapes that are nearly ghost towns, with a few hangers on living in rundown houses and farms. I saw a lot of empty fields across America's so called, bread basket, that could be used to grow food for people but are now fallow, and growing nothing but weeds. I also saw a bunch of very wealthy estates out in the middle of nowhere. Islands of excess in the lands of the poor.
The farmers are complaining that they've lost the overseas markets for their agricultural products due to the governments trade policies. But what about turning land that around to feed the hungry at home?
Trump doesn't want to pay for that. He'd rather pay for a lackluster military parade and start a trade war with the world at large. He'd rather pay billions to fund his personal war on immigrants by funding his now, private army, to round up all of the farm workers and construction crews to deport them. Which will further degrade the U.S. economy without all of this cheap labor.
Meanwhile, more and more white, native born Americans who largely voted for him, twice, are going hungry and homeless more and more every month.
Other people I noticed, were vacationing like nothing was going on anywhere else in the world. They were out playing with their expensive toys as if the economy weren't teetering on a knife's edge, the climate isn't tipping over into a slow collapse, and all is just wonderful with the world as they know it. I guess living life to the max without thinking of the consequences is how these people cope with the end of the world that may be soon upon us. Once the economy collapses soon, they won't be able to afford the payments on those toys anymore and they'll join the rest of the people in line at the food banks.
The costs of this tariff war haven't fully materialized yet in the U.S. here in June but it's starting to show. I went to one of our local pet stores recently to buy a new leash for our dog and I discovered that there are no longer any Chinese made products on their shelves. All I could find were German made retractable leashes, which is good for the Germans but the prices were five or more dollars more than what I paid for a Chinese made leash a few months ago. This is how the tariffs are manifesting themselves in our stores already.
Imagine how this is playing out across the country but the main stream news media isn't talking about this anymore. Apparently Trump's tariff war is old news now with the fear of American troops going back to the deserts of the middle east to fight another forever war with Iran. Before that, it was all about Trump's personal military taking down politicians they don't like, and the deployment of federalized troops in Los Angeles.
Whatever clickbait makes them money on any given day is all that matters now. Who cares about the hungry and homeless Americans everywhere. Who cares about all of the infrastructure falling apart everywhere.
Don't get me wrong. I drove through a lot of summer road construction crews in some states. They're trying but the damage is done. The roads and bridges of the U.S. are almost to the point of unsafe in a lot of states, and they can't keep up due to a lack of money. Even California, supposedly the fourth largest economy in the world. They aren't spending any of that money on the roads and bridges in the rural areas of the state, that's for sure. But they don't tell anyone that.
California isn't the only state with money that's not spending as much as they need to bring their infrastructure up to safety standards. All of these rough roads only cost the citizens a lot more money they don't have to keep making constant repairs to their vehicles. This adds to the cost for the commercial trucking companies to bring all of the food and products Americans need to go about their daily lives.
Instead of taking care of their citizens, some states would rather spend their tax money on stupid things like abortion bans and installing Christian themed wall decorations in their public classrooms. Meanwhile, crime rates in some places are soaring because native born citizens of all ethnicities are getting desperate for relief and they're taking out their anger on anyone they can.
Just for a fun statistic, this is the comparison of crimes committed by native born people versus immigrant reported crimes that I got from Googles AI search.
"Incarceration rates. In 2023, the incarceration rate for native-born Americans was significantly higher (1221 per 100, 000) compared to illegal immigrants (613 per 100,000) and legal immigrants (319 per 100,000). This means illegal immigrants were half as likely to be incarcerated, and legal immigrants were 74 percent less likely, than native born Americans. Note that the immigrant incarceration rate includes those detained for administrative immigration violations."
These stats came from institutions like The American Immigration Council, Migration Policy.org, and The CATO institute.
It's time the American people fully wake up to the fact that a lot of these fat cat politicians, both democrat and MAGA republicans, are all on the grift. They're stealing tax payer money to fund their lavish lifestyles of the rich and famous, giving tax breaks or fat government contracts to their rich campaign donors and leaving everyone else in the dirt.
There are a few politicians who are willing to step up and work for their constituents and try to do the right thing but they're few and far between anymore. Instead, we have idiots like Mike Lee of Utah and the other MAGA republicans from like-minded states, and democrats living in million dollar homes in gated communities, who would rather steal taxpayer money for their own personal gain and disparage anyone else who can't afford to attend their hundred thousand dollar a plate campaign fund raisers.
I will repeat this every week from now on. The only way we the people will ever get back what they've stolen from us, is to take it back from them with a rebellion. I don't mean a violent one like the colonists did to the British back in the 1770's but a quiet ousting of these greedy politicians who are lining their personal pockets with our hard earned tax money.
We need to vote these idiots out and elect better people to represent us. With our track record of doing that in the U.S., I don't see that happening. We're starting to see some pushback from the voters in some local and state elections but the greedy republicans are going all out on voter suppression.
If all else fails, one alternative is to divide the country up between the conservative republican states and liberal democrat-independent voter states and let it all go. Then these wannabe white, Christian Nationalists can do whatever they want and the rest of us can move on with a better life. It sounds simplistic but sometimes simple is good.
We better make up our minds pretty soon as the growing climate crisis is going to continue, no matter what our political differences are. Once we move past the point of no return (some would argue that we're already there), all of the politics in the world won't feed the people once the land becomes unable to grow food anymore. If we think we have a hunger problem now, wait twenty more years, as more and more climate scientists are telling us. The eastern U.S. and western Europe are experiencing a massive heat dome this week. Tell me that there's no such thing as global warming caused by greedy politicians and billionaires polluting the planet. If you still believe that climate warming is fake news, I have a bridge in West Virginia for sale, cheap.
One quick note before I go. There has been more and more discussion in the media about restriction of freedom of speech and the right of peaceful protest in the U.S., the U.K. and the EU of late. Mostly about the erosion of these rights lately. I responded to someone's article earlier this week and someone tried to admonish me a little bit about my mentions of rebellion on Substack. I also received an article this week from one of the founders of Substack talking about the governments attacks on free speech regarding articles in Substack. He cited the example of an Australian Substack writer who was turned away from entering the U.S. recently over, supposedly, his articles about the Columbia college Pro-Palestine protests last year. His articles are just one of many recent instances where public discourse about subjects that the U.S. government doesn't like is grounds for refusing entry to the country for non-citizens lately under Trump's authoritarian government. The responder I mentioned a minute ago told me that I needed to be careful with what I say on a public forum like this because the government is using AI to scrub the internet for words they don't like in order to force us to stop. The now infamous Substack writer, Ken Klippenstein, has found this out the hard way and written about his visits from the FBI in his posts in the last couple of months. As Stephen Miller continues his attacks on people he doesn't like, I will continue to fight back here.
My answer to this new crackdown on dissent is a middle finger to the Trump government. Let them come after me. I come from a long line of Irish rebels who've been carrying out rebellions against the British for centuries. The U.S. is just an extension of the old British empire anyway. I will continue to use my words to stand up for the people, defend my right to freedom of speech and the right to peaceful protest of government policies that bring harm to the people, even if I get a visit from the peelers. I just hope that's all I ever have to worry about is just a little talking to from some government flunky. We all need to stand up and protest against tyranny, no matter how hard it may seem. We can't let them intimidate us because that's how they win. Sláinte
After my break (where I air a plea for donations and plug my book via major book retailers and my website at www.crann-na-beatha.com), I read another excerpt from Michael Campi's dystopian future novel, The Priest, that kind of got shelved while I was on vacation. I’ll link it below if you want to read it.
Go raibh maith agat, thank you for watching or listening to the show today. I hope you enjoyed it and that you'll return again to help me protest against the would be tyrants.
As I say good bye this week, I wish to leave you with this rebel quote. "The fire that burns brightest in the rebels is the fire of freedom." Slán go fóill.
References:
Future Climate Means No More Breakfast
A new study shows the devastating impact of climate change on crop yields by 2100.
Umair Irfan for Mother Jones.com
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