this is a longer item than i usually post taking into consideration the attention span of many readers, but i post it because it reveals a lot about our current reality and how it came to be this way;

By the end of the Vietnam War, US corporations were no longer competitive in the world economy and were losing the bulk of their domestic market to imports, leading to de-industrialisation and the large-scale relocation of manufacturing to Asia, primarily China. Since then, the US has experienced large and increasing trade deficits regardless of currency exchange rates or other external conditions. With its military adventures financed entirely on debt, the US also began running increasingly larger budget deficits, with increasingly fewer funds for public programs like social welfare or education, or to maintain or rebuild its already-dilapidated physical infrastructure.

After the US abandoned the gold standard and unilaterally scuttled the Bretton-Woods agreement, debt financing for the Vietnam War resulted in a massive expansion of the money supply, leading to a decade of ruinous inflation. It doesn’t appear widely known or understood that during that single decade the US dollar depreciated by about 95%. As one measure, in 1971 a typical 3-bedroom home in an attractive suburb cost around $25,000 while ten years or so later that same home was priced at around $250,000.

It was then, at the end of the 1970s, that the US experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history, what James Petras appropriately called “The Great Transformation”. It was during this time under President Ronald Reagan that the invisible elite took the US government and the nation on an alarming ideological turn to the extreme right, and everything changed. In addition to the mass deindustrialisation of the country and the destruction of labor unions and workers’ rights, Reagan opened the doors to deregulation and privatisation, and effectively turned the keys of the country over to the elites and their large corporations and banks. It was this that paved the way for the parade of human, economic, political and military atrocities that continue to this day..........https://www.globalresearch.ca/rise-police-state/5695648