THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE

Advertise on more than 70 progressive blogs!

Posted by Time for change in General Discussion (1/22-2007 thru 12/14/2010)
Sat Jan 10th 2009, 04:28 PM

Why are so many subjects “unmentionable” in US politics? Because if people talk about them too much they could disrupt the carefully constructed reality that the GAME’s masters have foisted on us. And then people would stop playing the GAME.

About five months ago I wrote an article for DU titled “Unmentionable Things in U.S. Politics”. It started with this paragraph:

There are numerous things that absolutely cannot be mentioned by American politicians because they are …. well, “embarrassing to our country”. Mere mention of these things brings down the wrath of conservative pundits and moderates as well, and even some who consider themselves to be liberal or progressive. The wrath is likely to be so intense that few U.S. politicians dare mention these things because of the risk of being booted out of office – or worse. Three such things are: 1. the stealing of a U.S. presidential election; 2. referring to American military or covert actions as immoral, rather than merely as “misguided”; and, 3. imputing bad intentions, rather than mere incompetence, onto a U.S. president.

I then went on to give several examples, and I ended the post by talking about what I considered to be the bad consequences to our country’s of refusal to shine the light of day on these things.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about this. Why? Partly because it’s a very interesting puzzle to me, but more important is the fact that I find the whole thing terribly repressive. What’s repressive is not that I and my fellow DUers can’t mention these things. As a matter of fact, we do so all the time – and thus far I’ve suffered no ill effects from it, except that sometimes when I try to talk to even my liberal friends outside of DU about them they think I’m a little loony. But no big deal.

What’s repressive about it is that our elected representatives don’t mention these things either. We elect them to represent us and our nation, and they fail to even talk about some of the very most important issues. There are some rare courageous exceptions, like Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, but I get the impression that even they are muzzled to a significant extent.

Anyhow, as I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Mainly I’ve been thinking about what is the reason for so many unmentionable things. And it’s occurred to me that this provides the backdrop for a huge GAME that has been foisted upon us. One of the prerequisites of the GAME is to create an alternate reality that must be believed by a critical mass of people in order for the GAME to proceed. Why is that necessary? I believe it’s necessary because the reality is so terrible that if enough people consciously recognized it they would rise up and simply refuse to play the GAME.

Some questions and those who have provided some answers

I’ve read a great many books that have touched on the GAME in one way or another (though they don’t call it by that name), and some books that attempt to zero in on it. Needless to say, there is a tremendous amount of difference of opinion, even among those who seem to have some kind of a handle on the GAME. It’s so hard to know what to make of it all. About all I can say of the GAME’s purpose is that I’m almost certain that it is very nefarious. That’s why the GAME’s supervisors go to such length to hide the outlines of the GAME from us.

But here are so many questions that I want to see answered. What is the purpose of the GAME? When did it start? What are its rules and boundaries, and how have they changed over time? Who makes the rules? Who enforces the rules? How do they enforce the rules? Who are the insiders who know more about it than anyone else? What does the U.S. Congress know about it? What have our Presidents known about it? So many questions.

Some books I’ve read that I believe shine some light on the GAME

In the realm of fiction, “The Wizard of Oz”, “1984”, and “Alice in Wonderland” come to mind. In the realm of non-fiction, I would like to single out six authors who I believe have shone an especially bright light on the GAME, at least for me. I also include here the titles of posts that I’ve written about those books because those titles convey my beliefs about the purpose of the GAME:

Naomi Klein: “The Shock Doctrine – the Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. I’ve written about this in:
“The Relationship Between Torture and Occupation/Dictatorship”
“The Demise of Russian Democracy: A Lesson in the Perils of Allowing a Tyrannical Precedent”
“Connection between State-Sponsored Terror, Corporate Greed and Economic “Shock Therapy”
And on a more optimistic note: “The Countering of U.S. Imperialism – A Light at the End of the Tunnel”

John Perkins: “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Treat Poor Countries out of Trillions” and “The Secret History of the American Empire – Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption”. I’ve written about these in “The Moral Transformation of an Economic Hit Man”.

Antonia Juhasz: “The Bush Agenda – Invading the World, One Economy at a Time”. I’ve written about this in “The Purpose of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq”.

Bill Moyers: “Moyers on Democracy”. This book is a collection of Moyers’ speeches, in which a major focus is how our news media has been taken over by those who control the GAME. I’ve written about this book in:
“Bill Moyers’ Insights on Addressing the Perilous State of our Democracy”
“Bill Moyers to U.S. Military Academy: Before you Assume that I am Calling for an Insurrection…”
“Bill Moyers on How Money Is Choking our Democracy to Death”

Chalmers Johnson: “Blowback”, “The Sorrows of Empire”, and “Nemesis – The Last Days of the American Republic”. I talk about these in “The Last Days of the American Republic”.

William Greider: “Who Will Tell the People – The Betrayal of American Democracy” I haven’t written a DU post about this book, mainly because I read it many years before I joined DU and before DU even existed. I’ll just excerpt a blurb from the jacket to give you an idea of what it’s about.

Here is a tough minded exploration of why we’re in trouble, starting with the basic issues of who gets heard, who gets ignored, and why. Greider shows us the realities of power in Washington today, uncovering the hidden contours of relationships that link politicians with corporations and the rich and subvert the needs of ordinary citizens…

An example of the GAME – Stumbling into war in Iraq

The official story – the one we use to play the GAME
I think that the vast amount of poppycock surrounding the Iraq War provides a good example of the GAME in action. We have an official story from which our elected officials are not allowed to deviate very far:

The Bush administration honestly believed that Saddam Hussein, with his “weapons of mass destruction” and ties to al Qaeda, presented an imminent danger to our country. Through a combination of incompetence by our President and misleading intelligence presented to him by his intelligence agencies, the Bush administration was mislead to believe that Iraq presented an imminent danger, and in turn the Bush administration misled Congress into believing that.

But when the war commenced and no WMD were found, they had to find another story to provide an excuse for staying there. For that purpose they came up with “spreading democracy to the Iraqi people” (for the benefit of Americans with warm hearts) and “if we don’t fight them over there we’ll have to fight them over here” (for the benefit of those frightened souls who are dim enough to believe that our troops in Iraq are preventing terrorists from coming here).

The absurdity of the official story
But these official stories have so many holes in them that if we open our eyes we could drive a truck through them.

First, the Bush administration began planning the Iraq War from the first days of the administration.

Second, to the extent that intelligence agencies provided poor information, it was mainly because the Bush administration pressured them to do so – in order to enhance their war propaganda.

Third, there was plenty of information publicly available that contradicted the case for war that the Bush administration tried to make, thereby proving that it was lying. But in accordance with the rules of the GAME, no “respectable” news source dared to point that out. For example, when on September 7, 2002, Bush claimed that a new U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report stated that Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon, no such report existed. There are several other similar examples in this post.

Fourth, with respect to the claim that we were “bringing democracy” to Iraq, what possible sense did it make that we had to kill over a million innocent Iraqis, ruin their country and create more than four million refugees in order to bring them democracy? And if that wasn’t enough, opinion polls clearly showed that the Iraqis hated us and wanted us out of their country. Thus, in order for the GAME to continue, none of these things can ever be discussed – Not by our elected representatives; not by our “respectable” news media; not by the 9/11 Commission.

And finally there is the most obvious problem with the official story of all: Even if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, the idea that he could have posed a danger to us was still absurd. I love the way that Mark Danner explains this in “Words in a Time of War – Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President”:

If anyone had found those leaky old shells, what would have been changed thereby? Yes, the administration could have pointed to them in triumph and trumpeted the proven character of Saddam’s threat… But in fact, the underlying calculus would have remained: that, in the months leading up to the war, the administration relentlessly exaggerated the threat that Saddam posed to the United States… And it would have remained true and incontestable that… the case for attacking Iraq was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors…”

Which is to say, the weapons were a rhetorical prop and … we forget this underlying fact at our peril. The issue was never whether the weapons were there or not; indeed, had the weapons really been the issue, why could the administration not have let the UN inspectors take the time to find them? The administration needed, wanted, had to have, the Iraq War. The weapons were but a symbol, the necessary casus belli… Had a handful of those weapons been found, the underlying truth would have remained: Saddam posed nowhere near the threat to the United States that would have justified …. war.

Three Presidents who perhaps didn’t fully play the GAME

It seems to me that we’ve had three Presidents since World War I who, at least to some major extent, decided not to play the GAME. My list could contain omissions or commissions. But it’s the best I could do with the information I have.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Just prior to the Great Depression, the level of wealth inequality in our country was perhaps as great or greater than it had ever been. FDR made it clear that he intended to even the playing field, in pursuit of bringing his country out of the depression. I don’t know precisely who the controllers of the GAME were in those days, but I think it’s safe to say they included some of the wealthiest men in our country. They probably didn’t consider evening the playing field to be within the rules of their GAME. Consequently:

In the summer of 1933, shortly after Roosevelt's "First 100 Days," America's richest businessmen were in a panic. It was clear that Roosevelt intended to conduct a massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Roosevelt had to be stopped at all costs. The answer was a military coup. It was to be secretly financed and organized by leading officers of the Morgan and Du Pont empires. This included some of America's richest and most famous names of the time.

And how did that work out? Well, the coup failed, and FDR became even more brazen about his disdain for the GAME and its rulers. He gave a speech at the 1936 Democratic National Convention in which he explained the rationale for his New Deal, and in the process had a few combative words for those in charge of the GAME:

Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital … the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer…

The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property…. And as a result… the hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor – these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family – other people's money – these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

The controllers of the GAME hated FDR more than ever. But after the failed coup they couldn’t touch him. He lifted his country out of the Great Depression, in the process creating social programs that are still considered sacrosanct to this day. He was re-elected President by a landslide a record three straight times, and to this day most presidential scholars consider him the second greatest president of our history. Because of what he accomplished, our country experienced what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman calls the greatest sustained economic boom in United States history. It wasn’t until almost a half century following FDR’s rise to the Presidency that his New Deal began to be dismantled, by a nation in which a new generation of voters had little or no memory of him.

John F. Kennedy
Kennedy started off his political career and his Presidency fairly far to the right on questions of U.S. militarism – as were most Americans during the Cold War. He escalated our involvement in Vietnam (which he inherited from Eisenhower), and he began his presidency by invading Cuba. But he exhibited an extraordinary ability to learn from his mistakes.

A few months before he was assassinated, he gave a great and radical speech on behalf of peace that probably seemed terribly threatening to the military industrial complex. Here are some excerpts:

Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament -- and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitude -- as individuals and as a Nation -- for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every… thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward -- by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War and toward freedom and peace here at home.

First let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many of us think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed -- that we are gripped by forces we cannot control…

Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace -- based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions -- on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned…

Six weeks later, Kennedy announced to the American people the first nuclear test ban treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. He then undertook secret negotiations with Fidel Castro in an attempt to come to an accommodation with him. And, he began talking with his close associates about pulling out of Vietnam.

Four months later, Kennedy was assassinated.

Jimmy Carter
On the campaign trail in 1976, Carter was an outspoken critic of U.S. imperialism:

We’re ashamed of what our government is as we deal with other nations around the world… What we seek is … a foreign policy that reflects the decency and generosity and common sense of our own people.

Morris Berman, in his book “Dark Ages America – The Final Phases of Empire”, discusses Carter’s commitment to human rights as President:

Carter never stopped talking about the subject… He cut out aid to Argentina, Ethiopia, Uruguay, Chile, Nicaragua, Rhodesia, and Uganda because of human rights abuses.

Berman discusses the hopes engendered by Carter’s 1976 election to the Presidency and how the American people turned out not to be ready for that kind of change:

For a brief moment in American postwar history, the position of sanity found an echo… We would work for a more humane world order in our international relations, not seek merely to defeat an adversary; military solution would not come first; efforts would be made to reduce the sale of arms to developing countries…

But… the Carter morality was, within two years, heavily out of step with the return to the usual public demand for a more muscular and military foreign policy… Out-of-office cold warriors closed ranks, forming organizations such as the Committee on the Present Danger… Their goal – to revive the Cold War – was ultimately successful; Ronald Reagan and CIA-assisted torture in Central America were the inevitable results. And in the course of all this, a picture was formed of Jimmy Carter as weak, bungling, inept… That Carter would be perceived as weak, and presidents such as Reagan and Bush Jr. as strong, says a lot about who we are as a people…

But was Carter’s morality really out of step with the American people? Or was it rather that those in charge of the GAME worked hard to get Jimmy Carter thrown out of the GAME for his refusal to follow the rules – for example by making sure that the U.S. hostages being held in the U.S. embassy in Iran were not released until within five minutes of Ronald Reagan being sworn in as Carter’s successor?

A few more thoughts about the GAME

A fellow DUer, abq e streeter, recently quoted the comedian Bill Hicks, referring to President-Elects as follows:

No matter what promises you make on the campaign trail, blah blah blah, when you win, you go into this smoky room with the 12 industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down...and its a shot of the JFK assassination from an angle you've never seen before, which looks suspiciously like the grassy knoll, and then the screen comes up and the lights go on, and they ask the new president "any questions?

Some may see this post as written in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner. But it really wasn’t. I’m dead serious about it. I have many questions about the GAME’s precise nature, as I noted in the beginning of this post. But I truly do believe that the GAME is aggressively played, that it casts a giant shadow over our nation, that it poses a tremendous threat to the world, and that the scenario quoted by Bill Hicks above may not be too far from reality. I hate the GAME, I feel oppressed by it, and I fear it. For that reason, I love people like Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney for challenging it and fighting back.

What does President-Elect Obama know about the game and what is his role in it?

One of the biggest questions about our new President, for those of us who believe in the reality of the GAME, is where he fits in with it. On the one hand, he has given many indications since his election victory that he intends to play the GAME to the hilt. On the other hand, he often seems very likable to me, which makes it hard for me to imagine that he would do that. Maybe he’s just pretending to play the GAME now, so as to increase the likelihood that he will last at least until his historic inauguration. But on the third hand, it probably takes a tremendous amount of courage for a President to refuse to play the GAME. FDR refused, in the process doing wonders of good for our country. And he got away with it. Maybe the GAME’s leaders learned something from that. Kennedy apparently refused to play the GAME towards the end of his Presidency, and he ended up dead. Carter apparently refused to play throughout his whole Presidency, and … well, they didn’t need to kill him.

So the bottom line is that I have very little idea to what extent Obama will play the GAME, though all the indications are, I hate to say, that he is already participating in it.

But I can think of one very good indicator: Prosecuting high level members of the Bush administration for war crimes and crimes against our Constitution and our people. It is crystal clear that for the sake of our democracy – for the sake of the American people – that needs to be done. To fail to do so is to condone those crimes and to set the stage for it to happen again.

Yet it is just as crystal clear that to do so would be a great broach of the rules of the GAME. That was evident when Nancy Pelosi took impeachment “off the table” and kept it off, as well as when Congress failed to pursue Bush administration officials who refused to honor lawfully executed Congressional subpoenas.

The reason that it would be against the rules of the GAME to pursue high level Bush administration figures for war crimes I believe is this: The GAME depends above all else on maintaining the widespread belief that the United States is – as “super-patriots” are so fond of claiming – “the greatest force for good in the world”. I mean, what kind of person would be willing to volunteer to risk his life fighting in his country’s war if he didn’t have great confidence in the benevolence and motives of his country? Convicting the highest leaders of the U.S. government for war crimes would shatter that confidence to hell and would therefore radically change the fabric of American society. If the GAME were to continue at all, its rules would have to be changed beyond recognition.

If Obama pursues investigations into these criminals, that will be pretty solid evidence that he’s not a real GAME player. If he fails to do so, which I’m afraid might be the case, that will be good evidence that he intends to play the GAME – at least to some significant extent, and at least for now. It will be very interesting to watch this play out.

Discuss (219 comments) | Recommend (+125 votes)

The Unfulfilled Promise

The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals

Time for change

Notwithstanding the lofty sentiments and purpose of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the reality of the United States of America did not then – and never has – lived up to its ideal. Our nation remains today a long way from fulfilling the promise implied by those ideals. Yet, our Declaration was a great start, and it has long shone as a beacon of hope for people all over the world.

Throughout our history, while many have striven to close the gap between our highest ideals and the reality of our nation, others have focused on the accumulation of private wealth and power, at the expense of everyone else. In recent decades the latter have gained much ground, leading to increasing imperialism abroad and deteriorating democracy at home, characterized by routine (and legal) bribery of our public officials, the fusion of government and private corporate interests (corporatocracy), a corrupt election system largely in the hands of private corporations, a corporate controlled communications media, and the widespread acceptance of Executive Branch secrecy, routinely justified with little if any questioning, by the magic words “national security”. All of this is rapidly turning our country from the democracy proclaimed at our founding into a plutocracy (government by the wealthy and for the wealthy). The result is the most obscene wealth gap our country has ever known, the highest imprisonment rate in the world, rampant militarism, routine flaunting of international law, the least efficient health care system in the developed world, a pending environmental catastrophe that threatens to destroy the life sustaining forces of our planet, and myriad other problems that threaten to destroy our nation and tyrannize our people.

My new book, The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream – The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals, explores the roots and consequences of the demise of our democracy, and why most Americans have been unable to understand this process or even become aware of it. A good understanding of why and how we have deviated so greatly from the ideals of our nation is the first and necessary step towards getting back on the right track and revitalizing our society.

The book is currently being sold in electronic PDF format and can be purchased at http://www.unfulfilledpromise.com/Buy-the-... for $3.99. It will also soon be available in Amazon Kindle format. DU members who cannot afford to buy the book but would like to read it can pm me with your e-mail address, and I will send you a free PDF copy.

I’ve previously posted on DU a slightly earlier version of the introduction to the book, which is also posted at my site. Here is the Table of Contents, followed by a brief description of the three parts of the book:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Acknowledgements
Prologue – What is Wrong with the United States of America?

Part I – Root Causes of the Impending Demise of American Democracy
Chapter 1 – Legalized Bribery
Chapter 2 – Human Psychological Factors
Chapter 3 – Corporatocracy
Chapter 4 – Corporate Control of Media
Chapter 5 – Corrupt Election System
Chapter 6 – Government Secrecy
Chapter 7 – American Exceptionalism

Part II – A Sampling of Imperialist Actions
Chapter 8 – Slavery and its Legacy
Chapter 9 – Early U.S. Imperialism
Chapter 10 – U.S. Imperialism in Cold War
Chapter 11 – Iraq War and Occupation
Chapter 12 – Afghanistan War

Part III – Consequences
Chapter 13 – Election of George W. Bush
Chapter 14 – War and Imperialism
Chapter 15 – Class Warfare
Chapter 16 – Predator Financial Class
Chapter 17 – Shock Therapy
Chapter 18 – Contempt for Int. Law
Chapter 19 – The “War on Drugs”
Chapter 20 – Climate Change
Chapter 21 – “War on Terror”
Chapter 22 – Health Care
Chapter 23 – Unaccountable government
Chapter 24 – Response to 9/11 Attacks
Epilogue

PART I – Root Causes of the Impending Demise of American Democracy

It is somewhat difficult to separate the causes of our problems from their consequences, since they combine to form a long chain of cause leading to consequence, leading to more consequences, etcetera. Nevertheless, it seems worth while to identify the root causes of our problems, those that occur early in the chain and lead to so many of the tragic consequences we see today. The only chance we have of reversing the demise of our democracy is through addressing and attacking its root causes.

At the top of the list is the systematic bribery of public officials by the powerful corporations (Chapter 1) whom our government is charged with regulating in the public interest. Instead of calling it bribery, we call it “campaign contributions”, but what we call it isn’t as important as what it is. It is hard to fathom how democracy can survive when such a practice is legal and condoned.

Working in tandem with our system of legalized bribery is the nature of the people who inhabit our country. That is not to say that Americans are inherently substantially different than any other people. Human beings are imperfect, and that is probably a major reason why in a world where civilization began more than five millennia ago, the oldest written national framework of government in the world today – the Constitution of the United States of America – is only a little more than two and a quarter centuries old. Chapter 2 explores the roles of basic human needs, authoritarianism, psychological defense mechanisms used to prevent us from perceiving reality as it is rather than as we’d like it to be, and corrupted ideologies in causing us to passively accept the accumulation of power in the hands of ambitious and ruthless individuals who care about little else than expanding their own wealth and power.

When bribery of public officials is tolerated as an inevitable aspect of public life, government inevitably grows close to the wealthy interests that shower it with money in return for legislative and other favors. A malevolent symbiosis grows between the state and corporate power, resulting in rule by an oligarchy that is highly detrimental to the lives of ordinary people (Chapter 3). Using their accumulated wealth and power to manipulate our legislative process, the oligarchy grabs for more and more control of the communications media (Chapter 4) that are used to control the information available to and shape the attitudes of our nation’s people, in pursuit of their own narrow interests.

Since the 1980s an orchestrated campaign has been underway to demonize “big government”, thereby paving the way for private corporate control over more and more functions that were previously deemed intrinsic functions of government. Among those functions is the running of public elections (Chapter 5) – the function that symbolizes democracy perhaps more than any other single function. Consequently, the purging of selected registered voters from our computerized voter rolls has become a routine recurring event throughout much of our country, and without a doubt determined the results of the 2000 – and probably 2004 as well – presidential election. Just as bad, more and more of the counting of votes in our public elections have been turned over to private corporations, which count our votes using electronic machines using secret software to produce vote counts that cannot be verified by anyone.

Bribery, the fusion of government and private interest, fake and biased news, and corrupt elections are not things that government and its corporate allies want us to know about. Consequently, they construct walls of secrecy (Chapter 6) to keep us from obtaining information that sheds light on their activities. The perfect phrase for facilitating this is “national security”. When our government tells us that the “national security” requires that certain things be kept secret from us, the understanding is that to question such a pronouncement is unpatriotic, and to actually attempt to obtain the “secret” information may be treasonous.

But indefinitely maintaining secrets from the American people can be very difficult, because at least some people want to know what their government is up to. So in addition to the formal mechanisms of secrecy, informal mechanisms are constructed (Chapter 7) to keep vital information away from us. One of the primary methods for doing this is to make certain sensitive subjects taboo – that is, to create the widespread belief that discussion of these topics is so outside the bounds of acceptable human discourse that anyone who discusses them should be shunned by society, or worse. The most common issue that falls into this category is any discussion that sheds light on the disparity between American ideals and the reality of life in our country today.

PART II – A Sampling of Imperialist Actions in U.S. History

Notwithstanding the fact that our founding document says that “all men are created equal” and speaks of the inalienable rights of humankind, the United States has throughout its history partaken of massive exploitation of other peoples.

It is estimated that at the time of our birth, 18% of our population was black slaves. In our expansion westwards during the late 18th and 19th centuries, we decimated the original inhabitants of our continent, and often treated them with great cruelty. In 1846 we manufactured an excuse for war with our neighbor Mexico, in which we continued to expand our country westwards and southwards. In 1893 we began our overseas imperialism with the conquest of Hawaii. Our overseas expansion was greatly accelerated in 1898 with our participation in the Spanish-American War, which led to our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. With our arrival at world superpower status at the end of World War II, we began the Cold War, which led to and served as a rationalization for covert and/or direct military actions against myriad foreign nations over the next 46 years. With the September 11, 2001 attacks on our country, we declared a perpetual “War on Terror”, which served and continues to serve as an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, nations that posed no threat to us. We do not know when or if this perpetual war will ever end. We don’t know how many additional imperial conquests it will lead to.

Most Americans don’t think much about all this. Many of these actions are done in secrecy, and the American people don’t find out about them until many years later – or we never find out about them at all. Those that we do know about are spun into the most favorable light, to make them seem benign or even noble.

But these actions come at great costs: in the lives of our soldiers; in the ruined lives of the peoples of the victim countries; in trillions of dollars cost to our people and their future generations; in our international reputation; in anti-American hatred leading to terrorism; and, to our democracy itself. For how can a nation claim to believe in the inalienable rights of humankind specified in its founding document, while making a mockery of that belief in the way it treats other peoples? For that reason alone it is worth while to take a brief look at our long history of imperialist actions.

PART III – Consequences

In the Prologue I give a brief account of what I see as some of the worst and tragic consequences of the root causes that I discuss in Part I – to enable the reader to see where this book is heading. When elections of our public officials are for sale to the highest bidder… when our public officials are so addicted to the “campaign contributions” of their wealthiest constituents that they develop a symbiotic relationship with them… when our communications media are owned and controlled by an oligarchy of wealthy elites… when our citizenry lack the ability to differentiate propaganda from reality… when we allow machines provided by private corporations to count our votes using secret electronic software… then we should expect that the consequences will not be pretty or comfortable for the vast majority of our citizens.

In Part III, I explore those consequences in much greater detail, in the hope that the reader will agree with me that these are very serious problems, and that they must be successfully addressed if our country is ever to fulfill the promise of its ideals, or even make progress in that direction. When enough Americans recognize our problems as problems, stripped of the gloss and spin put on them by our oligarchy, they will rise up and do something about them. Until then there will be no progress, and we are very likely to head in the direction of all the former empires of our planet, ending in chaos, widespread catastrophe, suffering, and ignominy.

Profile Information

Time for change

DU Donor

12554 posts

Member since Thu Dec 2nd 2004

Silver Spring, MD, US

Male

Visit Homepage

Visitor Tools

Use the tools below to keep track of updates to this Journal.

	Track this Journal
	Blogroll this Journal
	RSS/XML

The Usual Suspects

	The Top 10 Conservative Idiots Mondays
	The Crisis Papers Tuesdays
	Ask Auntie Pinko Thursdays
	Blog Box Fridays
	Hate Mailbag Whenever

Greatest Threads

The ten most recommended threads posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums in the last 24 hours.

AlienGirl has passed away
16 recs : By Contrary1

More Greatest Threads

My Forums

Democratic Underground forums and groups from my "My Forums" list.

	Activist HQ
	Election Reform

Random Journal

Discussion Forums

Enter Discussion Forums

Big Forums

	Latest Breaking News
	Editorials & Other Articles
	Political Videos
	General Discussion
	General Discussion: Presidency
	The DU Lounge
	Ask the Administrators

More Forums

	Topic Forums (35)
	State & Country Forums (56)
	DU Groups (136)

Today's Featured Forums

	September 11
	Iowa
	Ancient Wisdom and Pagan Spirituality Group
	Deaf/Hard of Hearing Group

Latest Threads

The ten most recent threads posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums.

'National Review' calls on Gingrich to quit race
By DainBramaged

Small towns try to save vital grocery stores
By DainBramaged

ACLU: New Questions About Legality of Drone Strikes
By No Elephants

ACLU sues to force release of drone attack records (Story from February 1)
By No Elephants

Who voted against the NDAA?
By No Elephants

Fair Labor Association begins independent audits of Foxconn factories
By DainBramaged

Israel accuses Iran of bombings in India, Georgia
By No Elephants

Arrest after Amsterdam airport evacuated
By No Elephants

Big fight looms over Obama's budget proposal
By No Elephants

Pastor's daughter accidentally shot at church
By No Elephants

More Latest Threads