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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/how-corrupt-is-america-now

https://theduran.com/how-corrupt-is-america-now/

How corrupt is America now?

24 March 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Today, I spent hours on the phone and on the website of Microsoft and its subsidiary Skype trying to close my $2.99 monthly subscription to Skype which is automatically charged to my credit card account, but there is no human (only an automated) chatbox at their website, and no human available on any of the three listed phone numbers for Microsoft Customer Service (1-855-270-0615, 1-800-865-9408, 1-800-642-7676), all of which are fully automated and ultimately hang up on the caller (“Goodbye.”) if the caller has said to their robot something like: I’ve tried each one of your recommended pathways for help, but all are fully automated and none succeeded, none addressed my problem — none enable me to cancel my subscription — and so I need now to speak to a person, a real human, to deal with my need to stop being on auto-pay to Microsoft — simply to cancel my “subscription.” I then (being left with no alternative) phoned my credit card’s customer service, and they said that the only way that they would be able to block Microsoft from charging my account would be after they have already billed me the $2.99, at which point I could “dispute” the charge and MAYBE block further such charges from Microsoft/Skype. Based upon my previous experience with such matters — when the vendor’s allegations were taken unquestioningly as true and mine were not (even though I had presented proof, but the vendor provided none at all) — my assumption now is that the only way to get Microsoft to not extract $2.99 per month will be for me to trash this credit-card account and to use a different one (as I had done with regard to that prior credit card matter, regarding the earlier such incident). All of this has been necessary in order for me to stop being billed by Skype, which, after my having tried it for a month, I have never yet been able to place even a single call through to anyone. It’s totally unusable by me — and there is no customer service for help, but only their 100% robotized chatbox and likewise fully automated phone ‘help’ (via all three of those 800 numbers, all of which provide the same 100% automated routine up through their final and shocking abrupt “Goodbye”). Microsoft’s system is automated thievery, with no recourse and no accountability. But that has become fairly normal in America.

I have run into so many similar situations lately, so that I now recognize that not only is it now possible in the U.S. for large corporations to, basically, rob people and have no accountability for doing so (our consumer-fraud laws now have virtually, if not totally, zero enforcement), but this is now the norm in, at least, the United States — a country that is now brazenly, and only, for the owners of corporations, against the public — against consumers, and against workers. This isn’t merely Trump and the Republicans; it is also Biden and the Democrats — BOTH of America’s billionaires-controlled Parties. The only real difference between the two is the rhetoric: the Democrats are more hypocritical about it — they refuse to know that ‘their’ Party is ALSO part of the scam. It’s not their Party; it — like with the Republicans — belongs to only its billionaires.

I’m not saying that EVERY large U.S. corporation is now structured so as to rob the public (Apple, for example, isn’t, at least not YET), but I am saying that perhaps the majority of them now are. As recently as a decade ago, only few were like that — and there was at least some degree of federal and state enforcement against consumer frauds. (Now there isn’t — those days are gone.)

In international affairs, the same is true. Unaccountable constant deceit rules here too. For example: On 5 May 2015, Chicago Review headlined “Myth Busting: Robert Pape on ISIS, suicide terrorism, and U.S. Foreign Policy” and interviewed the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, who had done the first and only systematic study “of suicide attacks around the world from the early 1980s to 2003,” and he said that “I was really struck that half the suicide attacks were secular. I began to look at the patterns and I noticed that they were tightly clustered, both in where they occurred and the timing, and that 95 percent of the suicide attacks were in response to a military occupation.” Colonialism — imperialism — was the overwhelmingly dominant reason why the vast majority of these terrorist incidents had been perpetrated; and, moreover, these are the worst, the most dangerous, types of terrorist attacks, because “The average suicide attack kills 10 people, whereas the average non-suicide attack, even in the very same countries, typically kills one person. So they’re tactically [ten times more] effective.” He was especially condemnatory of The Atlantic’s March 2015 cover story, “What ISIS Really Wants”, by Graeme Wood, of Yale’s Political Science Department (who has since become notorious for his misrepresentations of news-events and of history): “I think it’s just wrong. Wood is painting a picture of ISIS as all religious, all the time. Interestingly in the second section he is talking about how the main difference with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda is that ISIS really wants territory.” Well, now that al-Qaeda, with crucial help from the U.S., Turkey, Qatar, and the Sauds, has taken over Syria and thus shows that it TOO “really wants territory,” this is yet further confirmation of the study that Pape did, which is virtually ignored by not only the U.S.-and-allied press (such as The Atlantic) but by their Governments. The fish rots from the head down. Consequently, the U.S. empire’s press is probably the world’s most corrupt (dishonest — heavily censored) of all. (Interestingly, Pape Himself, in that interview, wasn’t, in any way, critical of imperialism — not even because he had established that imperialism causes terrorism. Maybe he knew that, if he were critical of imperialism, that would jeopardize his career, since American imperialism — “neoconservatism” — is what all of America’s billionaires demand from the politicians whose careers they fund, and promote in their news-media. Nonetheless, Pape has been courageous to continue challenging — with empirical studies — also OTHER commonly spreaded lies by the neoconservatives.)

And this is how and why such atrocities as America’s rapes of Iraq and of Ukraine have been carried out and constantly lied about.

And it is also the reason why, whereas the American public want America’s ‘Defense’ (Aggression) Department to be cut the most, the U.S. Government is now in the process of cutting the most Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and services to the poor — the very same areas that the U.S. public want to be cut the least, or even be increased. Corruption now reigns without any effective challenge  in America.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.