Apologies to mexico

"In economics, we talk about “externalized costs”: this means the way that you and I pick up the real cost of oil production with local and global ecological degradation or wars fought on behalf of the oil corporations. Or the way Walmart turns its employees into paupers, and we pick up the tab for their food stamps and medical care. With the drug economy, there are externalized traumas. I imagine them moving in a huge circulatory system, like the Gulf Stream, or old trade routes. We give you money and guns, lots and lots of money. You give us drugs. The guns destroy. The money destroys. The drugs destroy. The pain migrates, a phantom presence crossing the border the other way from the crossings we hear so much about. The drugs are supposed to numb people out, but that momentary numbing effect causes so much pain elsewhere. There’s a pain economy, a suffering economy, a fear economy, and drugs fuel all of them rather than making them go away."
Rebecca Solnit: Apologies to Mexico - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

...When I was a kid and we'd get our weekly reader (remember that little piece of propaganda?) there was often a graph with our output of goods, commodities, education etc compared to the rest of the world, especially Russia, and man we were on top across the board! Now the only Americans (corporations if you will) that are on top across the board are some of the business and corrupt money mentioned above, and if we can't or won't get a handle on it, like the story, around and around it go's.. Not crying, not whining, just stating a fact!