Have things gotten really worse, or have I just become an Old Fart?

[delrem]

11. The US-Western middle-class has always been protected.

So the US-Western middle-class could afford to be passive voyeurs as e.g. Central/South America was ravaged by psychopaths trained at the School of the Americas, where mercenary "contras" and allied right-wing death squads did their business with full backing of the USA from the President on down. That's why Eric Prince and Dick Cheney and Haliburton could make billions, with almost zero public awareness. The US-Western middle-class could afford to be passive voyeurs who at most offered their "opinions" for/against at the dinner table, then go to sleep fully sated - with an overwhelming feeling of superiority over the "stone age type" victims of the process. That was the whole weltanschauung.

But that and all military/economics like it was in the service of absolutist capitalism, an idea that doesn't *finish* until the extreme few at the top of the $$$ ladder take it all, control it all, with no thought whatsoever for the common wealth, the common good. In fact that entire philosophy sees the common wealth, the common good, as a military/economic enemy to be defeated at all costs. That's why "socialism" is such a dirty word in the US. That's why an universal single payer health care system just plain isn't on the table in the US.

Now we're in a finishing stage of that process and, like the middle-classes of all the sacrificed countries who've already been consumed, it's the turn of the middle-class of the US to be consumed by the *identical* process, because there's nothing else left.

But hey, in the USA Karl Marx's work is considered to be the work of the devil incarnate.