Time for change's Journal - The Countering of U.S. Imperialism

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The Countering of U.S. Imperialism – A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Posted by Time for change in General Discussion
Sat Apr 05th 2008, 01:16 AM

I believe that most Americans and their country will benefit enormously by having their country’s military might and imperial ambitions humbled by the rest of humanity. Then we will be able to live in peace and work with the other nations of the worl

“All the world thinks of the United States today as an empire, except the people of the United States. We shrink from the word ‘empire’… We feel that there ought to be some other word for the civilizing work we do so reluctantly in these backwards countries.” – Walter Lippmann, 1927

I believe that the above quote by one the most astute American journalists of the 20th Century is right on target and applies even more today than it did in 1927. It sums up what is most wrong with our country: A toxic combination imperialism, arrogance, hypocrisy, and ignorance.

Our imperialistic war in Iraq says it all. Even after the original excuse for the war was proven to have been fabricated, after we killed more than a million civilians, created more than four million refugees and utterly destroyed their country, our leaders still find more excuses to continue the war. Our national news media, while sometimes bemoaning the deaths of American soldiers, rarely says a word about the deaths of more than two hundred times as many Iraqi civilians, or what the Iraqi people think of our occupation of their country – as if their deaths and their opinions simply do not matter. Hannah Arendt was right when she said:

Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.

Any U.S. citizen who doesn’t understand how U.S. imperialism has operated since 1973 should read Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. It’s one of the most informative books I’ve ever read, and so easy to read for such a complex subject.

The United States has used two primary tools to advance its imperialistic ambitions: Covert activities and military support to install or maintain in power repressive regimes that are responsive to the needs of U.S. corporations, to the great detriment of the vast majority of a nation’s population, and; influence over international financial institutions (International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank) to loan money to desperately impoverished nations while imposing conditions on those nations which are highly favorable to U.S. corporations, while keeping the great majority of its inhabitants impoverished indefinitely – a process something akin to loan sharking or indentured servitude.

The game plan has been to put into practice Milton Friedman’s economic theories, developed at the University of Chicago. These theories, when used in several countries over more than three decades, have served primarily to increase the wealth and power of the wealthy (U.S. and multi-national corporations and the local elite) at the expense of everyone else. The use of these economic policies in association with violent and repressive dictatorships is no accident. Since these policies are so painful to the vast majority of a country’s inhabitants, such measures as kidnappings, executions, disappearances and torture are often needed to keep the country’s inhabitants in line. But often, financial pressures and threats alone are enough to do the job. Taken as a whole, Klein terms these methods “shock therapy” – a therapy that is brutal enough to make a person or a population docile enough to go along with what they’re told to do.

Examples of U.S. imperialism

I’ve discussed this process in several previous posts, using mostly examples from Klein’s book. In “Connection between State Sponsored Terror, Corporate Greed, and Economic Shock Therapy” I describe our imperialistic activities in South America. Klein’s book begins with Chile in the early 1970s, where our CIA conspired to overthrow the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and installed the dictator, terrorist torturer, Augusto Pinochet in his place. I also discuss in that post our imperialist interventions in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and other South American countries, and our use of School of the Americas and Operation Condor to achieve our ends. Klein summarizes our imperialist interventions in South America:

The Chicago School counterrevolution quickly spread. Brazil was already under the control of a U.S. supported junta… Friedman traveled to Brazil in 1973, at the height of that regime’s brutality, and declared the economic experiment a “miracle”. In Uruguay the military had staged a coup in 1973 and the following year decided to go the Chicago route…. The effect on Uruguay’s previously egalitarian society was immediate: real wages decreased by 28% and hordes of scavengers appeared on the streets… Next to join the experiment was Argentina in 1976, when a junta seized power from Isabel Peron. That meant that Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil – the countries that had been showcases of developmentalism – were now all run by U.S. backed military governments and were living laboratories of Chicago School economics.

In this post I describe how the IMF was used to plunder Russia following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Klein describes the effect on the Russian people:

After only one year, shock therapy had taken a devastating toll: millions of middle-class Russians had lost their life savings when money lost its value, and abrupt cuts to subsidies meant millions of workers had not been paid in months. The average Russian consumed 40% less in 1992 than in 1991, and a third of the population fell below the poverty line. The middle class was forced to sell personal belongings from card tables on the streets.

In “The Ruling Financial Class” I describe how the IMF did the same thing to several Asian countries whose economies were failing in the late 1990s. Klein describes the effects on the Asian people:

24 million people lost their jobs in this period… What disappeared in these parts of Asia was what was so remarkable about the region’s “miracle” in the first place: its large and growing middle class… 20 million Asians were thrown into poverty in this period of what Rodolfo Wash would have called “planned misery”… Women and children suffered the worst of the crisis. Many rural families in the Philippines and South Korea sold their daughters to human traffickers who took them to work in the sex trade… a 20 percent increase in child prostitution.

And Klein describes how similar processes with similar results were used in Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Iraq.

THE CENTURY AND A HALF WAR AGAINST SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES

I discuss the century and a half war against socialism in the United States in detail in this post. One way in which this subject is relevant to the issue of U.S. imperialism is that that, during the Cold War at least, the United States often used the fear of Communism as an excuse to overthrow the governments of other countries (as the Reagan administration did] in Latin America, for example) or to go to war against them (as we did in Vietnam, for example).

Two major problems with that excuse were that in most of the cases where we exercised our imperialism over third world countries: 1) they had no direct link with the USSR, which was the only Communist country that posed a potential military threat to us, and 2) the country was not Communist, but rather socialist. Notwithstanding those facts, the U.S. government utilized a “slippery slope” type of reasoning, where any degree of socialism in a country could represent the first step towards Communism and hence an alliance with the USSR. And then there was the “domino theory”, where any country that turned Communist or socialist could result in other countries doing the same. So, in the name of “freedom and democracy” we repeatedly intervened in the affairs of other countries to overthrow democratically elected governments or prop up ruthless dictators with our military or economic powers.

Reasons for the US war against socialism

Since the purported reasons for our century and a half war against socialism clearly make no sense, it behooves us to consider the real reasons for it. In order to understand those reasons it is first necessary to understand that much of the history of the United States, beginning with the industrial revolution that picked up steam after the Civil War (1861-1865), has involved a type of class warfare, whereby the wealthy have sought to increase their wealth and power by suppressing any movement that sought to bring power to the lower classes.

Policies which tend to benefit the less wealthy and powerful include such things as: protections against environmental degradation; protection for consumers against the risks of dangerous products; protection against dangerous working conditions; anti-trust laws to ensure competition; anti-discrimination laws; progressive tax laws; minimum wage laws; provision of government health care, education, and child care assistance; promotion or assurance of full employment for those able and willing to work; and labor laws that strengthen the bargaining capabilities of workers. These kinds of policies provide needed protections to the most vulnerable of our people and benefit the good majority of the remainder of our people.

The wealthy conservative elite of our society tag the “Socialism” label on all those laws and policies, listed above, that benefit less wealthy and powerful 98% of our population, and especially those that benefit the poor. They accuse anyone who advocates those policies of being “Socialists” and of engaging in “class warfare”. They do that, very simply, because those laws and policies reduce their own wealth and power.

That is what the century and a half war against socialism in the United States has been mostly about. Those conservative elites are right about one thing. The policies that they rail against are indeed socialistic. When added to a primarily capitalistic system, such as operates in our country, they produce a mixed capitalism/socialism system which can maintain the production incentives of capitalism while at the same time guarding against the harmful excesses of capitalism which tend to drive people into poverty and reduce the quality of life of millions of our citizens.

To the extent that successful socialist policies (such as national health care) operate in other countries, they have the potential of providing an example for Americans. If Americans see that the citizens of countries with socialist governments thrive and continue to re-elect those governments, they may consider whether or not it would be beneficial to have such policies instituted in their own country. Thus the need to intervene in those countries when feasible, to make sure that examples of successful socialist governments remain as few as possible. Naomi Klein expands on this idea:

Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater threat than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify and made for a handy enemy… The favored tactic for dealing with the inconvenient popularity of developmentalism and democratic socialism was to try to equate them with Stalinism, deliberately blurring the clear differences between the worldviews. (Conflating all opposition with terrorism plays a similar role today.)

A brief history of the war against socialism in the United States on the domestic front

Our war against Socialism did not start with the Cold War. Suppression of the labor movement in the United States constitutes a major part of our war against socialism. For example, by attributing the Haymarket Square bombing of 1886 to labor leader “terrorists” and imprisoning or executing the alleged perpetrators (with extremely little evidence of their guilt – See “Death in the Haymarket – A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America” for an excellent discussion of this), our elite national news media probably set back the cause of the labor movement by several years or decades. Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for President of the United States, was repeatedly imprisoned for speaking out about his beliefs. And Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1970, concluded that the United States had experienced at least 160 instances in which state or federal troops had intervened in strikes, and at least 700 labor disputes in which deaths were recorded, with clearly most of the violence being perpetrated by state or federal authorities, rather than by the workers.

The FDR Presidency (1933-1945) represents the first successful effort in our country to introduce socialist policies that produced major benefits for our people. Cass Sunstein, in his book, “The Second Bill of Rights – FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever”, describes the philosophy that motivated Roosevelt to fight for his radical (at the time) programs to benefit the American people:

To Roosevelt, human distress could no longer be taken as an inevitable by-product of life, society, or “nature”; it was an artifact of social policies and choices. Much human misery is preventable. The only question is whether a government is determined to prevent it…. Foremost was the idea that poverty is preventable, that poverty is destructive, wasteful, demoralizing, and that poverty is morally unacceptable in a Christian and democratic society.

As I discuss in this post, FDR’s policies were wildly successful and resulted in the creation of a financially healthy middle class in our country for the first time in its history. Between 1947 (when accurate statistics on this issue first became available) and 1980, median family income rose steadily (in constant 2005 dollars) from $22,499 to more than double that, $47,173.

But then, starting with the rise of the conservative movement in our country, and the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Presidency, FDR’s New Deal began to be progressively dismantled, with consequent stagnation of median income and progressive widening of the income gap in our country. And that’s where we are now.

A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

When I posted on DU my four articles dealing with the imperialistic adventures of our nation as described by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine”, several posters commented on how terribly depressing this whole thing is. Indeed, this is a very depressing subject. But in the last chapter of her book, titled “Shock Wears off – The Rise of Peoples’ Reconstruction”, Klein describes a developing trend, especially in Latin America, that appears to be very hopeful.

The stripping away of the aura of respectability surrounding Friedman’s economic movement

Klein cites the pinnacle of the Neocon movement in the U.S. as being 1994, the year that Republicans took control of Congress. Almost certainly by mere coincidence, but still worth noting, is the fact that the day that the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 was just nine days before the death of Milton Friedman. By that time, a UN study found that the richest 2% of adults in the world owned more than half of the wealth in the world. Klein writes of that fact:

The hoarding of so much wealth by a tiny minority of the world’s population was not a peaceful process, as we have seen, nor, often, was it a legal one… Many of the men who had been on the front lines of the international drive to liberate the markets from all restrictions were at that moment caught up in an astonishing array of scandals and criminal proceedings.

In support of that statement, Klein cites several instances to show how former victims have been striving to bring the perpetrators of crimes against them to justice: Augusto Pinochet was under house arrest; in Argentina, the former junta leaders were stripped of immunity, with some of those leaders being imprisoned; the former President of Bolivia was wanted on murder charges; in Russia, many of the oligarch billionaires were either in jail or in exile; Ken Lay died in prison; Grover Norquist was accused of influence-peddling; and then there were the whole series of scandals involving Jack Abramoff. Klein notes the significance of all this:

This list, by no means complete, represents a radical departure from the Neoliberal creation myth. The economic crusade managed to cling to a veneer of respectability and lawfulness as it progressed. Now that veneer was being very publicly stripped away to reveal a system of gross wealth inequalities, often opened up with the aid of grotesque criminality…

As people shed the collective fear that was first instilled with tanks and cattle prods… many are demanding more democracy and more control over markets. These demands represent the greatest threat of all to Friedman’s legacy because they challenge his most central claim: that capitalism and freedom are part of the same indivisible project.

The wholesale rejection of U.S. imperialism in Latin America

Klein describes the rejection of U.S. imperialist policies in Latin America:

On the international stage, the staunchest opponents of Neoliberal economics were winning election after election. The Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, running on a platform of “21 Century Socialism”, was re-elected in 2006 for a third term with 63% of the vote. Despite attempts by the Bush administration to paint Venezuela as a pseudo-democracy, a poll that same year recorded that 57% of Venezuelans were happy with the state of their democracy, an approval rating on the continent second only to Uruguay’s, where the left-wing coalition party Frente Amplio had been elected… In stark contrast to this enthusiasm, in countries where economic policies remain largely unchanged… polls consistently track an eroding faith in democracy, reflected in dwindling turnout for elections, deep cynicism toward politicians and a rise in religious fundamentalism…

Opposition to privatization has become the defining issue of the continent, able to make governments and break them; by late 2006, it was practically creating a domino effect. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was reelected as president of Brazil largely because he turned the vote into a referendum on privatization… In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Sandinistas, made the country’s frequent blackouts the center of his winning campaign…

Rafael Correa… called for the country “to overcome all the fallacies of neo-liberalism”. When he won, the new president of Ecuador declared himself “no fan of Milton Friedman.” By then, the Bolivian president Evo Morales was approaching the end of his first year in office. After sending in the army to take back the gas fields from multinational “plunderers,” he moved on to nationalize parts of the mining sector. In this same period in Mexico, the results of the fraud-tainted 2006 elections were being contested through the creation of an unprecedented “parallel government” of the people… Chile and Argentina are both led by politicians who define themselves against their countries’ Chicago School experiments…

Today Latin Americans are picking up the project that was so brutally interrupted all those years ago. Many of the policies cropping up are familiar: nationalization of key sectors of the economy, land reform, major new investments in education, literacy and health care…

Chavez has let it be known that if an extremist right wing element in Bolivia… makes good on its threats against the government of Evo Morales, Venezuelan troops will help defend Bolivia’s democracy… Rafael Correa is set to take the most radical step of all… Correa’s government has announced that when the agreement for the (U.S. military) base expires in 2009, it will not be renewed. “Ecuador is a sovereign nation… We do not need any foreign troops in our country.”

How Latin America gets away with defying U.S. power

Klein provides three related reasons for how Latin America has been able to get away with defying U.S. power in recent years.

First is the fact of massive amounts of grassroots popular backing for throwing off the yolk of U.S. imperialism and moving on with projects to benefit the whole population. When power is decentralized it is much more difficult to overthrow it. Removing a single leader from power is then not so easy or effective, as the U.S. found out when massive uprisings in Venezuela thwarted its attempted coup against Chavez.

Secondly, Latin American countries have decided that they have had enough of loans from the IMF, with its restrictive conditions that force millions into poverty. The rejection of IMF loans in Latin America has been so complete that their percent of the total IMF lending portfolio has shrunk from 80% in 2005 to 1% in 2007. And it’s not just Latin America. During the same time period the IMF’s worldwide lending portfolio shrunk from $81 billion to $11.8 billion. Klein sums up the future of the IMF:

The IMF, a pariah in so many countries where it has treated crises as profit-making opportunities, is starting to wither away. The World Bank faces an equally grim future.

And finally, there is the fact that the region has become much more integrated in its effort to throw off U.S. imperialism. Many Latin American nations stand ready to share resources with neighbor nations who lack those resources. For example, Chavez has offered heavily subsidized oil to the poorer nations of the region.

Klein also notes several other examples throughout the world where nations are turning away from U.S. favored Neoliberal economic policies. But Latin America in the prime example, and Klein explains why:

As inhabitants of the first shock lab, Latin Americans have had the most time to recover their bearings. Years of street protests have created new political groupings, eventually gaining the strength… to begin to change the power structures of the state…Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise… Today… there are just too many people in the world who have had direct experience with the shock doctrine: they know how it works…

CONCLUDING REMARKS – TO RIGHT WING FOOLS WHO DON’T LIKE WHAT I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THIS

I know what the reaction will be of right wing fools who read this post. They’ll be SHOCKED that an American citizen could “hate America” so much. They’ll hate me for failing to take pride in our military might, and they’ll consider me a traitor for my happiness at the thought of our military power being attenuated by third world nations that don’t have the sense or gratitude to do what we want them to do. They’ll say that I want us to “lose” our war in Iraq, that I want to “weaken” our country, and that I don’t deserve to live in this country. Before answering charges such as these, I’d like to preface my remarks by briefly summarizing the balance sheet in Latin America, as described by James Petras in his book “Ruling and Ruled”:

If we add to the concentration of $157 billion in the hands of an infinitesimal fraction of the Latin American elite, the $990 billion taken out by foreign banks in debt payments, and the $1 trillion taken out by way of profits…. over the past decade and a half, we have an adequate framework for understanding why Latin America continues to have stagnant economies with over two thirds of its population with inadequate living standards.

The responsibility of the US for the growth of Latin American billionaires and mass poverty is several-fold and involves a very wide gamut of political institutions, business elites and academic and media moguls. First and foremost the US backed the military dictators and Neoliberal politicians who set up the billionaire economic models.

My answer to those who would castigate me for being outraged over a situation like this is that I cannot take pride in a system that creates billionaires at the cost of throwing millions of people into poverty, misery and fear. I cannot take pride in a country that the rest of the world accurately sees as the world’s biggest bully. And I cannot take pride in bombing the hell out of a country that poses no threat to us, killing hundreds of thousands of its people, and destroying its infrastructure.

None of these things do anything at all to improve my life. Nor do they do anything to improve the lives of the vast majority of my fellow Americans. Instead, they create anti-American hatred, thereby fueling the recruitment of anti-American terrorists, while destroying the lives of millions upon millions of people throughout the world. Only an arrogant idiot could take pride in all that.

Yes, I hate it when my government does those things. Yes, I hope that we “lose” the Iraq war, if “losing” means stopping the death and destruction and taking WW III off the table. Yes, I hope that the rest of the world counters and defeats our imperial ambitions – or rather the imperial ambitions of our wealthy elite and war profiteers who profit from US imperialism.

A government should be judged by how it benefits or harms its citizens and how it benefits or harms the rest of humanity. No nation has the right to destroy the lives of other peoples just to enhance the wealth and power of a wealthy elite minority.

I believe that most Americans and their country will benefit enormously by having their country’s military might and imperial ambitions humbled by the rest of humanity. Then we will be able to live in peace and work with the other nations of the world to make a better life for all of us. If wanting that means “hating America”, then so be it.

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A summary of my DU posts

Time for change

The good majority of my DU posts consist of one of six general subjects: The need to remove from office the current cancer upon our nation; election fraud; the tragedy of the Bush administration; my ideas on the liberal values that we all hope will some day replace the values that our current government runs on; historical events that I believe cast light upon our current situation; and other political ideas.

The need to remove Bush and Cheney from office

In 2006, John Conyers wrote a 198 page report, documented with 1,401 references, titled “The Constitution in Crisis – The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance”. The title of his report reflected the primary reasons why George Bush and Dick Cheney must be removed from office: They have made a mockery of our Constitution – the foundation for the rule of law in our nation – by consistently violating it. Our Constitution, if we can keep it in fact and not just in name, makes our nation much more than just a democracy. By providing protections for minorities and the powerless, our Constitution adds civility, humanity, and decency to what could otherwise be a barbaric nation – democratic or not.

Aside from the continuing damage that Bush and Cheney can do to our country in their remaining time in office, including their potential to involve us in ever expanding new wars, failing to remove from office the most lawless presidential administration in our history will set an awful precedent in our nation – a precedent for doing away with our Constitution. Providing in our Constitution a mechanism for impeachment and removal from office was of utmost priority to our Founding Fathers. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “When once a republic is corrupted there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles…”

Many arguments have been put forward against impeachment. This post answers those arguments. Some opponents of impeachment mistakenly advocate the view that the impeachment of public officials requires evidence of the commitment of an actual crime – and would not be justified by such things as gross violation of the public trust, corruption, negligence, or incompetence. Leaving aside the fact that such an interpretation would leave our nation subject to rule by people who would do great and possibly irreparable harm to it, the preponderance of evidence flatly contradicts that interpretation.

Others claim that we don’t have enough evidence to proceed with impeachment. I argue here that the current evidence for impeachment is so abundant, arguing that we need more sets the impeachment bar at an absurdly high level.

Others argue we don’t have the votes for impeachment – which implies that we must not bring individuals to trial until we have counted the votes, rather the using the trial to get the votes. Such an argument ignores the likelihood that votes will accumulate as Americans watch the impeachment trial and become intensely exposed for the first time to the many outrageous crimes of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it also ignores the fact that Senators who refuse to vote for conviction will probably be putting their seats in jeopardy.

But perhaps the most urgent reason for moving to impeach Bush and Cheney as soon as possible is that their continuing refusal to be bound by the laws and the Constitution of our nation raises the spectacle that they may be planning a coup d’etat. Why else would they go to such lengths to destroy our Constitution and the rule of law in our nation? We must preempt them by moving as quickly as possible on this.

Election fraud

The DU apparently was born as a result of the 2000 November-December election fraud that began the long nightmare that is the George W. Bush administration.

I went to bed on Election Day 2000, shortly after Bush was announced as our new President, feeling as if the end of world civilization was near at hand. My wife woke me up a couple hours later to tell me the good news that the announcement of Bush’s Presidency had been temporarily cancelled. Thus began a period of 36 days that I followed more intensely than any other news event of my life – ending in the infamous and disastrous Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of our long road to dictatorship.

My son (EOTE) joined DU in January 2001, a few days after it began, but I did not, for reasons that now escape me. I did, however, do a lot of writing about the 2000 election, including a desperate plea to my Maryland Senators, to please demand a real recount of the 2000 Florida vote. And I also contributed an article to DU on that subject, in my son’s name (I did not use my own name because I was a federal employee and I was afraid that I could get into trouble for writing such an article), in the spring of 2001.

The fraudulent 2004 Presidential election is what brought me into DU. I had worked as a volunteer in the Kerry/Edwards campaign, I had followed the presidential polls obsessively, and by Election Day 2004 I was about as confident as I could be that John Kerry would be our next President. Thus, the reported results of that election were both profoundly disappointing and difficult for me to believe, as they were for the great majority of DUers.

I immediately began an effort to acquire as many election statistics as I could, in a feverish and desperate attempt to prove that the election was a fraud, which I hoped would aid in its overturning. In late November I had my son post an analysis that I did of the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results (Note: My son supplied the title, which I feel is too strong, which you can see if you read the article). And finding that it was awkward to have my son post my articles, I joined DU a few days later.

Since then I have posted dozens of election fraud related threads, a small number of the most important of which I have included in my journal.

In particular, I have come to believe that the main mechanism by which the 2004 election was stolen was the massive and illegal targeted purging of Democratic voters in Ohio, especially in Cleveland. This thread contains a great amount of evidence to support that contention.

In addition, I believe that there is good evidence that says that large numbers of votes in Cuyahoga County were deleted by its central tabulator, as explained in this thread, which also discusses an early 2006 partial audit of Cuyahoga County. And, I think that the death of Raymond Lemme, who while investigating Clint Curtis’ sworn allegations of vote switching computer programs, was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just a couple weeks after telling Curtis that he had traced the corruption “all the way to the top”, is extremely suspicious to say the least. Here is my explanation of the controversy over the discrepancy between the 2004 exit polls and the official 2004 vote count. And here is a summary of several reasons I have written about for believing that the 2004 election was stolen.

Finally, here are my ideas for preventing another stolen election in 2006 and 2008.

The tragedy of the Bush administration

The fake war on terrorism

I believe that a crucial requirement for a good understanding of the Bush administration’s actions since September 11, 2001, is the realization that its “War on Terrorism” is nothing but a colossal fake. Only with that realization do numerous Bush administration characteristics and actions make sense, including: Its disinterest in Osama bin Laden; its great urge to rush into a war with Iraq at any cost; its utter contempt for international law and the rest of the world; its succession of no-bid contracts for its wealthy friends; its lavish tax cuts for the wealthiest of our citizens and corporations during ‘time of war’; the Dubai port deals; and, its attempt to turn our democracy into a dictatorship.

With that in mind, I wrote in this post about the main reasons why I believe that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9-11 attacks. There are many reasons why I believe that now, but the initial and still most important reason is the utter failure of our military, the mightiest military that the world has ever known, despite repeated warnings and more than ample time on 9-11 itself, to protect its own capital city.

Abuse of the human rights of prisoners for no apparent purpose

To me, the most sickening and disgraceful aspect of the Bush administration’s “War on Terrorism” is its complete lack of concern for human rights, demonstrated among other ways by the indefinite confinement, without trial or even bringing of charges, of thousands of prisoners of war, and its frequent use of torture. I have discussed this issue in several OPs, starting with this one. Here I describe the issue as seen through the eyes of a U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain who had ministerial responsibilities for hundreds of our prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who witnessed the severe and daily abuse of his charges over a period of several months, and who eventually was imprisoned himself when it was felt that he was making too many waves over what he had seen. Here is my summary of what the great journalist Seymour Hersh had to say on this subject, based on his numerous high level sources. Jimmy Carter felt so strongly about this issue that he broke the unwritten rule against ex-Presidents criticizing sitting Presidents, with one of the most scathing attacks on this policy that I have ever seen. And Senator Richard Durbin was the victim of continued public verbal abuse from the right for daring to make public how our government was treating its prisoners.

Lying us into war

It is evident to most informed people that one of the biggest motivations for Bush's "War on Terror" was to provide a justification for the invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh’s excellent account of how the Bush administration manipulated and twisted intelligence in order justify a preemptive war against Iraq is a must read for anyone who still supports this administration and thinks that the Iraq war was necessary. And as for Bush's excuse that we are now fighting that war for the benefit of the Iraqi people, Democrats should start talking about how the Iraqi people actually feel about us being in their country.

Just how bad are Bush and his cronies and how much danger do they pose to American democracy?

George w. Bush and his administration and fellow travellers in today's Republican Party are about as bad as they come. They are anti-science ignoramuses. They are chicken hawks. They have no consciences. They are torturers. They are cowards. They are evil. And I doubt that there are any moral boundaries beyond which they will not go to get their way.

I think that in the interest of preserving our democracy, we should be aware of the similarities between the Bush administration and Hitler’s Nazis (which I wrote about even before the revelations about Bush’s warantless wiretapping), and understand that if we aren’t vigilant, yes it CAN happen here too.

Moral values that separate us from today’s Republicans

It makes me so mad to hear people ridicule what they consider to be “liberal values” and compare them unfavorably to the wonderful moral values of George W. Bush and his Republicans friends. In the vast majority of cases these people don’t even have a vague idea about what liberal values really are. They have simply been conditioned by our corporate media over several years or decades to believe that liberals encourage irresponsibility, are ‘soft’ on national defense and ‘law and order’, and are wild spenders. These ridiculous myths about liberals have in turn encouraged the Democratic Party to disavow the liberal label and in some cases to veer way to the right. I submit that, rather than running away from the liberal label we should be proud of it, and we should challenge those that seek to disparage it. And to further make this point I posted a tribute to several historical and current political leaders who have been unafraid to speak out loudly for what they believe in, and I suggested an answer to those Republican morons who accuse liberals of hating America.

Let's take a look at some of the specific moral values that separate Democrats from Republicans:

Republicans like to pretend that they're more moral than us because they're more "religious"

Many of those who disparage liberals are fundamentalist Christians who repeatedly invoke the name of Jesus Christ, and who believe that the superiority of their moral values to those of liberals and Democrats is proven by their repeated references to Jesus. Don’t these people understand that Jesus was a liberal, whose moral values were much closer to those of the Democratic Party than to those of the Republican Party, with whom they align themselves and vote for? Isn't it an astounding paradox that the Republican Party has usurped for their own purposes one of the most liberal religious leaders in world history, while at the same time showing nothing but contempt for liberals and liberal principles?

The movement for privatization of government functions

One of the biggest threats to our democracy is the privatization movement. In the name of “freedom” and “self-reliance”, the leaders of this movement advocate the freedom of powerful corporations to destroy our environment and to run our elections, our schools, our social safety net programs, and our prison system, as well as every other program which has long been considered a legitimate function of government. The fact that government is elected by the people to serve public functions, whereas the purpose of private corporations is to make profits for their investors, is either totally lost on these people, or else they simply feel that the above mentioned programs should be run for profit rather than for service.

Al Gore alluded to this issue in his great film, "An Inconvenient Truth", where he discussed the unholy alliance between government, private industry, and the press, whereby a corrupt government, in exchange for legal bribes from the industries they are supposed to control, propagates false information and policies that are favorable to those industries instead of the public that they are elected to serve. I discuss my own personal experience with that unholy alliance, where the FDA withdrew an about to be published scientific article I had written, under pressure from a manufacturer who stood to be economically hurt by the information in that article.

The need for a free and independent press

Another great threat to our democracy is the ownership of our country’s news media by a very small group of wealthy individuals who have strong ties to the Republican Party, and whose motivation in providing “news” is to maintain satisfaction with the status quo, rather than to report what is important and true. Two prime examples of corporate media shills and pseudo-journalists who pretend to be real journalists are Chris Matthews and Tim Russert. Bill Moyers explains how this situation threatens to destroy our democracy, and how this came about through the dismantling of rules and regulations which were meant to prevent the monopolization of our news. And Robert Parry explains why he started his web site to help combat the misinformation we get from our corporate media.

Health care

Liberals, and most other decent people, believe that people should be entitled to decent health care. That is why, prior to the "pro-life" administration of George W. Bush, infant mortality rate in the United States had been steadily declining for several decades. But shortly into the Bush administration, due to the starving of women and infant health programs for federal funds, infant mortality rate began a steady rise. Nor do Republicans care much about veterans' health, as indicated by the rejecting of this much needed veteran's health bill in the U.S. Senate by virtually a strict party line vote.

An enquiring mind

One of the many tricks that our corporate media uses to squelch alternative viewpoints is to label anyone who substantially disagrees with their “correct” version of the news as “conspiracy theorists”. Well, I have news for them. The views of us “conspiracy theorists” are usually much more closely aligned with reality than is most of the trash that we hear from the corporate news media these days, such as the stories about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which were used to justify our illegal preemptive invasion of that country. We “conspiracy theorists” believe that it is not only the right of American citizens to challenge the corporate news media story lines, but it is our responsibility as well, as good citizens who care about our country.

The dignity of all human beings

Perhaps the most important value held by liberals is a belief in the dignity of all human beings – hence the 19th century movement by liberals to abolish slavery. Here is one of my favorite stories on that subject.

A summary

And here is a post where I talk about all the major values that separate Democrats from Republicans.

Historical events that help us understand our present

Though there is little doubt that George W. Bush is by far the worst president we’ve ever had, our past history is at least partly responsible for preparing the way for this tragedy. The history of our nation is full of examples of failures to live up to our ideals. In addition to our long history of slavery and our near extermination of the Native American population of our present day country, we began a long history of overseas imperialism beginning in the late 19th Century. The long standing history of extreme hostility to socialism by the elites of our country has been responsible for much of this imperialism, as well as domestic repression against labor unions and others who would speak out against the status quo. The usurpation by our Executive Branch of the war making powers given to Congress by our Founding Fathers did not originate with George W. Bush. And the attitudes fostered by our long history of slavery are still with us today, especially in the areas of our country where slavery thrived for so long.

Today, as the transgressions of George Bush and Dick Cheney threaten the existence of our nation as we know it, we would do well to recall how the German nation was led into tyranny more than six decades ago. The parallels between Hitler’s war on terror and George Bush’s war on terror are extraordinarily striking in my opinion. And the better able we are to recognize the danger, the more likely we are to take steps to prevent a similar fate.

Political ideas

Republicans have 3 great advantages in elections against Democrats, whereas the only advantage that the Democratic Party has is that its policies are meant to serve all Americans, rather than just the select few. In addition to electoral fraud and huge sums of money donated to the GOP by their corporate masters as legalized bribery, Democrats have to contend with a multitude of news media whores.

But those advantages are not sufficient for a Party that has nothing of value to offer to our country. So, when we suggest investigation of their corrupt deeds they call us conspiracy theorists. When we suggest policies such as making basic affordable health care available to all Americans they accuse us of class warfare. And when we criticize the rampant corruption at the highest levels of government they accuse us of "hating America". And when none of that works they try to scare us by telling us that if we don't give them unlimited power over us we risk being killed by terrorists.

If there was ever a presidential administration that needed to be impeached, this is it. Grass roots efforts are under way to accomplish this, and we can all help. Our Democratic leaders need to seriously consider and talk about this. And they must be united and avoid inter-party warfare.

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Time for change

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