It was nice knowing you, AmericaJon Rappoport NPR reports: Every month, 14 million Americans get a disability check from the government. In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. As of December 2012, 47 million Americans were on food stamps. The USDA assesses the annual cost of the program at $71.8 billion. Separate from food stamps, and apparently not including other members of a household where at least one person is receiving government payments, we have 4.3 million Americans on welfare. Medicaid, the government medical-care program for the poor, lists 50.1 million people enrolled in 2011. If you include Americans who were on Medicaid for at least one month in that year, the number swells to 70.4 million. As a result of Obamacare, the US Dept. of Health and Human Services predicts 20 million new people will be added to Medicaid in 2019. Forbes Magazine states the annual cost of healthcare in the US is $2 trillion. And yet, concealed from the public, this money is used to wreak incredible destruction on the people. In 2001, a landmark article in the LA Times, written by Linda Marsa, reported that 100,000 Americans are killed by FDA-approved pharmaceutical drugs every year, and 2.1 million more people are hospitalized as a result of adverse reactions to the medical drugs. In all, there are 22 million significant adverse reactions each year in the US. The Times article was based, in part, on a July 26, 2000, review by Dr. Barbara Starfield, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Is US health really the best in the world? Of course, there are also the untold numbers of Americans exposed to GMO crops, fluorides, and toxic pesticides. And then there is the number of people US troops have killed and maimed in recent foreign wars. Economic sanctions alone, between the two Iraq wars, killed 500,000 Iraqi children. How did this culture of death and disability take over? Could one possibly attribute the great change to a deterioration of principle? And its replacement with a sheer intent to conquer, sell, consume, profit, gorge, and cheat no matter what the outcome? Given the fact that more and more Americans dont even know what a principle is, its obvious that a deterioration has occurred. Forget the idea of help from central government. It continues to rot as it expands. It enables spokespersons who wouldnt be able to wake up in the morning if they didnt have at least a dozen lies to tell during the coming day. The commander-in-chief of lies is the president. Bush, Obama, it makes no difference. Lies, obfuscations, omissions, pretenses, excuses, cover stories. Theyre a presidents stock in trade. Some presidents lie more convincingly than others. Its exactly what you would expect from any major corporate CEO. The federal government is basically a self-generating bank with an army. A public official is a person who a) cultivates a corrupt objective and then b) drapes it in false Caring. Heaven slowly reveals itself as Hell. A public official is a fragment of scum seeking to join a larger lake of scum. A public official attempts to earn entrance to a circle of people far more corrupt than he ever dreamed he could be. Media anchors are barnacles on public officials. Viewer-adherents to the nightly news are androids who, as they sit mute before their screens, experience a weak electric signal they interpret as satisfaction. Sensorily, telepathically, intellectually, the androids transit to their young the value of these signals. The official apparatus of information merges with the human nervous system to illuminate a desolate cartoon that plays over and over and produces movements in ligaments, tendons, and muscles called life.. From brain to brain and mind to mind, without sound or word, the affirmation of an existence empty of principle is transmitted at a speed beyond that of light. The collective consciousness anticipates the next hyper-sentimental tragedy in the circus maximus. Technocrats are busy designing a machine-brain that will mimic all these reflections, and this machine will be called utopia. With eyes averted, the populace studiously ignores the figure standing in the wings: The individual. The awake individual. The alive and intensely creative individual, who is free. The individual who refuses to join the crippled parade. Why would he join it? For the barely traceable comfort of a wan washed-out hope? The principle of the free and powerful individual was once a barrier against the assault of the government-corporate State. It was a reminder that we could live beyond the shadow of collectivist destruction emblazoned in the statistics I cited above. The principle offered the promise that groups of such free individuals, without compromise, could band together and embody achievement, strength, and independence from entrenched authority. But an intense psychological operation was underway and has continued to this day. Its essence is: the collective is everything, the hive is everything, the individual is nothing, the individual is the cause of all our trouble. Turning the truth upside down and deserting the principle of the individual has done as much harm to the house of this nation as any bomb could. More actually, because of the effect on the mind and spirit. The answer to this massive crime and its effects has to begin with a renaissance of the individual, no matter how distant the prospects of success may seem. Waking up isnt a group phenomenon. The building block is the single human being. The layers and webs and networks of collectivist illusion have to be wiped away from his eyes. The Group as the basis for all life is the lie that has gotten us this far down the road to perdition. It is the image promoted by the psyop. It is the false dream that has been used and twisted to push an agenda of endless Need which must be fed from Above. From the earliest days of history on this planet, top-down authority, aided and abetted by a privileged priest or intellectual class, has monopolized power by defining the population as a mass and a group, and that formula has been assiduously followed in every society and civilization. The results, in this country, are there for anyone to see. So is the solution. Life, power, and consciousness begin with the individual. We can try to tap dance our way past that, we can make excuses and proclaim theory after theory of disability, we can raise flag after flag on behalf of group security, but nothing will change. We are at the same gate, the same doorway, the same starting point. And in that place, we have a choice. To live with the spirit, energy, and imagination of the free individual, or to enroll in the amorphous collective and shove in all our chips on the future that will bring. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Tom Paine, December 23, 1776 Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 