Dr. Cornel West has formally announced he is running for president on the People’s Party ticket. Cornel will be a singular voice for serious social and political change in an electoral system saturated with corporate money and rigged to crush third parties. He is calling, in short, for a political revolution and the overthrow of the ruling corporate class.

The US is using what remains of its strength to try to restore its global position. This aggressive drive is fueled by its long history of wars which helped to recast American society into one managed by corporations and the state. What is paradoxical is that its imperial ideology happens to be not fascism but a form of liberalism refitted for rationalizing military and political expansion.

There is no report, investigation or new revelation, including the recent release of Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” that will implode the myth that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. Myths are impervious to facts. They fulfill an emotional yearning.

In Latin America, the desire to expand relationships with Russia and China, and to remain neutral on the war in Ukraine, is partly rooted in the violent history of imperialism in the region. If Ottawa and Washington fail to realize this, they will continue to isolate themselves in the hemisphere while enabling the growing influence of the geopolitical rivals they are supposedly trying to obstruct.

The war state harbors within it the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the US war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.

America’s goal has become to preserve its imperial hegemony no matter the cost to others. Whereas Xi insists on the necessity of a more open world in order to allow the further development of today’s immense global forces of production the United States has regressed toward the reestablishment of trade blocs, economic sanctions and war in order to maintain its dominance.

Our society is deeply diseased. We must heal these social illnesses. We must mitigate this anomie. We must restore the severed social bonds and integrate the dispossessed back into society. If these social bonds remain ruptured it will guarantee a frightening neofascism. There are very dark forces circling around us. Sooner than we expect, they may have us in their grip.

The recent Australia, US, and UK $368 billion deal on buying nuclear submarines has been termed by Paul Keating, a former Australian prime minister, as the “worst deal in all history.” It commits Australia to buy conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines that will be delivered in the early 2040s. These will be based on new nuclear reactor designs yet to be developed by the UK.

Many of the apologists for the war in Iraq seek to justify their support by arguing that “mistakes” were made, that if, for example, the Iraqi army was not disbanded, the occupation would have worked. They insist that our intentions were honorable. They ignore the hubris and lies that led to the war, the misguided belief that the US could be the sole major power in a unipolar world.

There will come a time when the Ukrainians, like the Kurds, will become expendable. They will disappear, as many others before them have, from our national discourse and our consciousness. They will nurse for generations their betrayal and suffering. The American empire will move on to use others, perhaps the “heroic” people of Taiwan, to further its futile quest for global hegemony.