What is really happening is that U.S. capitalism-imperialism is continuing to “perfect” parasitic exploitation, murderous oppression, and massive destruction, of people and the environment.

Let’s get into this.

Many people who do not deny that terrible things have been done throughout the history of this country, try to excuse this by making this argument about “creating a more perfect union”—insisting that, “despite our many problems, we are continuing to make things better.” They point to things like “the growth of the Black middle class” and the extension of rights to people who had long been denied those rights: Black people and other people of color, women and LGBT people. But this ignores some very ugly reality. As I have shown before (in my message Number Three as well as Number Two):

The USA is a country in which a woman is assaulted/beaten every 9 seconds. It is a country where huge numbers of women are raped and otherwise sexually assaulted every year; a country where the right to abortion has been ripped away from women, enforcing male supremacist control over their bodies, and their very being—in a very real sense a form of female enslavement. This is a country in which LGBT people are discriminated against, persecuted, bullied, vilified and abused, brutalized and outright murdered.

At the same time, in this so-called “great democracy”:

The police kill a thousand people every year, especially people of color, and in the 60 years since Civil Rights Acts were passed, segregation and discrimination has remained as bad, or worse, as it ever was, and thousands of Black people have been killed by police—even greater numbers than all those who were lynched during all the years of Ku Klux Klan terror after the Civil War!

Yes, there has been a growth of the “Black middle class,” but the other side of this picture is the mass incarceration of especially poor Black and Latino men, and women in growing numbers, who have been excluded from a middle class life: the U.S. has the greatest number of people incarcerated and the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world! At the same time, millions of poor Black people, and others, women in particular, who are not part of any middle class, are slaving away at low-wage jobs in a desperate attempt to hold their families together, while they are forced to live in segregated, gutted out communities and are discriminated against in every part of society. And even “middle class” Black people cannot escape the racism, discrimination, brutality and murder by police that is directed against Black people as a whole in this country (in fact, no Black person, no matter how “highly placed,” can fully escape this).

What underlies this whole situation is the great increase in the parasitism of this country: feeding off the vicious exploitation of billions of people around the world, including hundreds of millions of women and more than 150 million children. Over the last 50 years, there has been a massive shift in the U.S. economy: large numbers of jobs in basic production have been “exported overseas,” especially to poor countries, and the super-exploitation of people in those countries has gone along with the increased role of the high tech and finance sectors of the economy, and the professional occupations, in this country. The wealth created by this parasitism has made possible a “middle class” existence for many, even as large numbers of people, especially those in lower-paying jobs and the ranks of the unemployed, are excluded from this.

As one example of this parasitism, a few decades ago most of the clothes that people in this country wear were made in this country, but today a tiny percentage are made here, while the majority are produced in places like the South Asian country of Bangladesh, on the basis of cruel, and literally murderous, exploitation of masses of women there. At the same time, as a result of the domination of the world by this system of capitalism-imperialism, in the poor countries millions of children die every year from starvation and disease that could be prevented, while more than 40 million women are enslaved in international sex trafficking.

At revcom.us there are two articles by Raymond Lotta that get into all this in great depth (go to revcom.us and search “Lotta,” “Imperialist Parasitism” and “Industrialization of Sexual Exploitation, Imperialist Globalization”).

All this while U.S. imperialism has for decades been the number one destroyer of the environment, and just since World War 2 it has slaughtered millions of people through unjust wars, coups and other violent actions, in places like Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, and Congo. The U.S. remains the only country ever to use nuclear weapons, with its atomic bombing of two Japanese cities at the end of World War 2, in 1945—a hideous act of mass extermination of civilians, for which the U.S. government, down to today, has never apologized, never admitted it was wrong, while the U.S. imperialists continue to develop even more horrendous weapons of mass destruction and refuse to say that they will not be the ones to “strike first” with nuclear weapons (again)!

What I have pointed to here is the fundamental—and truly horrific—reality beneath the claims about how this country is “continuing to move toward ‘a more perfect union.’” As I said at the beginning: The truth is that U.S. capitalism-imperialism is continuing to “perfect” parasitic exploitation, murderous oppression, and massive destruction, of people and the environment. And the even greater truth is that all this is totally unnecessary: a fundamentally different, truly emancipating way to organize society and the relations among human beings, all over the world, is possible.

That is what I will be getting into, in my next message.