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The Real America
Some sane person writes an LA Times Commentary, though I am not sure that the headline is correct:
This isn’t the real America by Jimmy Carter
IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.
These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.
At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.
Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.
These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation’s tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.
Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.
Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.
Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody.
Instead of reducing America’s reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.
Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation’s global environmental policies.
Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America’s working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).
I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.
As the world’s only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.
It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.
The best President the US ever had.
The Real America ?
The elites have manipulated the wider populous since at least the War against Spain circa 1898 … I could go on about 100,000’s of thousands of deaths re the 50 years ‘protectorate’ of the Philippines, etc.
Yet, the crux of the issue is an almost wilful ignorance of the wider citizenry, combined with a determined, sustained, persistent effort to erase, deny, obfuscate unpalatable aspects of our true history … the values and beliefs we hold dear clash with the facts …
Why do ‘they’ Hate us ?
Its not because of who we are or how we live … it’s all about how our government and its policy instruments have and do interact with the rest of the world in terms of the consequences of our actions, interventions and especially foreign policy … the overarching consideration being an ever greater subservience to the immoral(?) and apparently unquenchable avarice of corporate capitalism …
We deny or are denied our history … yet the rest of the world is not as systemically dominated by our internal white propaganda … the current Bush&Co are so disdainful of the sheeple that they don’t even really attempt to maintain the mask, the facade of decades past … we are apparently above and beyond the ‘lesser’ nations of the world …
Our Republic has progressively been hollowed out from within and I’m not referring to just the last five years.
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
– Walt Whitman
It ain’t about Democracy in Iraq. It’s about the same reasons we and the British overthrew Mossadeq (?) in Iran in 1953 (?) and installed the peacock dictator the Shah of Iran and beefed up his massive military machine and his brutal secret police. It’s about the same reason we managed coups in Iraq and the installation of Saddam in Iraq and beefed up his massive military machine and his brutal secret police and then enticed him to invade Iran re the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war … to overthrow Iran and regain control of the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and the co-located energy resources. More than 50+ years of supporting and financing pliable ‘allied’ dictatorships …
We didn’t give a shit about Democracy in Iran from the fifties to 1979. We didn’t give a shit about Democracy in Iraq before 1990 and certainly not when we invaded in 2003. And we still don’t give a shit about Democracy in the Middle East, Latin America or anywhere else really, today or into the future.
“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.”
– Aristotle
As long as the vast majority of American citizens exist in wilful or irresponsible ignorance, electronically doped by a complicit corporate media, abrogating their duty towards a vigorous and vibrant democracy that truly does adhere, held beholden to our oft trumpeted values … then the people, the nation we believe we are, will truly be but a nostalgic shadow of a memory from our long past.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
– American Declaration of Independence, a text written primarily by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the United States Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
Well, apparently not. Certainly not if you are unfortunate to be a human who happens to live on land holding resources we desire, and especially so if by nationality, you’re not one of us, American.
/rant over
Posted by: Outraged | Nov 14 2005 14:22 utc | 9
slothrop- your words revile others…”the conceit of a loser” is not a philosophical argument for or against pragmatic action or thought.
your seeming aversion to the ideals of democracy, rule of law, and so on…what do you propose to replace them with?
you are the one who terms respect for those things “reflexive,” not me or others who happen to think that democracy, and especially democratic socialism, offers that “middle ground” toward stability and lack of want and respect for human rights.
do you really think that the state will fall away and people will live together without exploiting one another…whether the exploitation is called capital or power or the grift..without laws to promote civil society?
the enlightenment did not cause the genocide of native americans. the enlightenment did overthrow the idea of the divine right of kings, and the idea of an inherited privlege. the enlightenment resulted in Jews being given citizenship on the same basis as Christians in Europe, via that nasty Napoleon. the enlightenment was the rationale for abolishing slavery.
enlightenment is not about manifest destiny or racism…where did you ever get that idea?
but of course, we are human animals, and we do not act perfectly. we have a tendency toward xenophobia. we hoard, oftentimes more than we need, out of fear of want.
if we suddenly had a socialist revolution…do you think that would stop the abuses that have been part of human history since it was recorded? –no matter what form of govt was in place? have you ever seen a socialist govt act that way? if socialism is viable, it should be able to function in spite of outside pressures…because there will always be outside pressure and competing wants and needs.
I assume your science isn’t Lysenkoism.
you apparently did not understand or distorted my remark about enlightenment and horrors along the way…so let me clarify by saying that of all the various systems that have been enacted, those based upon enlightenment ideals have been able to change and learn, it seems to me.
but, yes, there have also been bad things. do you think things would be better if you had revolution? do you think that ppl would not be destablized, would not be killed, would not be victimized as one group tries to establish power over a competing group and idea?
is it so unreasonable to prefer evolution rather than revolution? I do think that if you don’t have one you will have the other, because if societies do not evolve to include greater enfranchisement, then you leave people no choice. but I do not think this is inevitable. imo nothing is inevitable, in political terms.
Following Thomas Paine, a female small biz person wrote in “The Divine Right of Capital,” that we overthrew the divine right of kings in our thinking, but not the idea of the divine right of those who concentrate wealth among themselves and claim they deserve to have the laws favor them.
national socialism was nazism, not Marx. and it did spring, in part, from romanticism, from glorifying mystical ideas a utopian society composed of aryans. I was responding to the links in the post from Monolycus, above. Goethe, Wagner, Hegel. all of these are great artists or thinkers…but the application of ideas isn’t necessarily what we intend, is it?
what we must accept, imo, is that people see the world differently, and change occurs because reason triumphs over suspicion and fear, and because then ppl are able to understand that they benefit by laws that also benefit others.
of course, this may seem less obvious if you are among the richest 1% of Americans, but even they would benefit, even tho they’re too removed from the lives of others to see it.
I was not responding to any sort of philosophical issue, beyond your insults toward others who do not believe in a utopian world.
as far as philosophy, I suppose I’m just too pragmatic, and Foucault’s take on power seems more accurate to me than Marx’s views in this time and place in history.
Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 15 2005 2:47 utc | 50
LEGION Speaks
NYT, though disgusting, is still the national paper of record. So what kind of memory does the United States have as a nation? What hurt for so long was trying to take the thing straight. But I think – and this may be apropos to our discussion of how to navigate the words of the disgusting and the compromised – the NYT can be read informatively as long as you realize it is a kind of institutional Sybil, a prophet that can only speak when refracted through a heinous fragmented personality disorder.
But let us name this tribune as it deserves, taking a hint from an instructive New Testament story, and give the New York Times a name it has earned: Legion.
So what did Legion have to say today? All truth! Only disguised…
Head twisting alarmingly/U.S. news as foreign news
President Ousted in 2005, Was Making Money Off War, Stealing it From People
” “Over the last four years the U.S. has paid little in the way of rent. Yet at the same time, the U.S. was paying inflated fuel prices to companies stolen by the family of the former president.”
A lawyer representing the family, Maksim Maksimovich [TBA] said the former president had not been involved in improper business dealings connected with the base and described the Kyrgyz [Fitzgerald, TBA] investigation as politically motivated.
Vomited up news – old news reported for the first time
Within weeks of his appointment by Republican leaders in early 2003, Mr. Holtz-Eakin declared, to their dismay, that Mr. Bush’s tax and spending plans would do little or nothing to stimulate long-term economic growth.
Subsequently, the budget office released a report that found that Mr. Bush’s tax cuts were heavily skewed in favor of the wealthiest Americans.
Threats to possess other hosts
As Election Nears, Canada’s Prime Minister Promises Tax Cuts
Distortion of the Truth
New NYT name for “class” is – “identifying eight never-before-identified voting blocs based on people’s shared everyday interests and concerns”
In which Legion apparently groks something about class: [ it was thought-based.] without ever confessing that class is the question.
With these new, multiethnic “thought-based” groups in hand, Mr. Bloomberg’s aides said they were able to transcend the traditional political fault lines of race, party and class that have been so crucial to city elections of the past, in the process developing a new model for running elections. This model, they maintain, could just as easily transcend the differences between red and blue states nationally in 2008.
Oddly, one true title seemed to emerge from the mouths of hell:
Prsioners of the Senate
But the oddity was quickly squelched as Legion brown-nosed a High Prefect of the 9th Level” smallest quarterly profit increase in four years” called “A Christmas Card to wall Street”
Upon which the paper broke out into shilling for the company directly:
It is offering the Big Sister Dora doll for $18.98, a dollar less than Target and Toys “R” Us. A hand-held Sports Madden 95 TV video game, from Electronic Arts, is $15 at Wal-Mart, compared with $18.79 at Target and $29.99 at Toys “R” Us, according to a survey conducted in October by A. G. Edwards.
Oh, and for those interested in the story on the woman suicide bomber, let’s not pass over in silence this bit of public history by Legion, a quote that you can only find in the print edition (p. A3, 4th top of 4th column in story): the original story was retitled and edited to dis-include this try at fake history. Evidence of actual editing? A reality-based history? …
The Marines decided to seize control of Falluja again on November 2004, but not before thousands of insurgents fled, leaving behind only those intent on achieving martyrdom by carrying out a rearguard action.
Surely those ‘intent martyrs’ included the 10 year olds and men turned back at barriers who were later found chemically melted and burned to death.
Legion is not guilty of laziness.
Posted by: citizen | Nov 15 2005 17:56 utc | 87
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