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Time for change's Journal
We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo. Its implications are too alarming. Any politician who says aloud what some of them know… is vilified as defeatist or unpatriotic. Many are clueless, of course, and others are too scared to raise forbidden subjects. I understand their silence and I do not forgive them – William Greider, from his new book, “Come Home, America – The Rise and Fall (And Redeeming Promise) of our Country”.
Almost two years ago I posted an essay on DU titled “Unmentionable Things in U.S. Politics”. I said about these unmentionable things: 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. Other than being unmentionable, there are two characteristics that these things have in common: 1) They attack the arrogant myth that the United States and its people are so indisputably better than every other nation and people that we have the moral right to impose our will on them, and 2) The major purpose of this myth, as propagated by the American elites, is to maintain the status quo, and along with that, their own wealth and power and place at the top of the food chain in our nation’s hierarchy. William Greider touches on the American taboo, its importance, and its solution in the first two paragraphs of his book: We are in much deeper trouble than many people suppose or the authorities want to acknowledge… We must be honest with ourselves, face the hard facts, and put aside some comforting myths. Then, we must find the nerve to take responsibility again for our country and democracy… I don’t want to argue whether Americans are better or worse than other people. My assumption is that we are no better and no worse, but that in the past several years we have strayed so far from many of our ideals that it is the height of arrogance to believe that we have the moral right to impose our will on the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is that even if it was true that we are better than other people – in intelligence, wisdom, and morality – we would still not have that right. If we are so much better than other people that we have the right to lead them, then we should do so by example, not by military threat and violence. That other nations of the world are deciding more and more not to follow our lead should cause us to rethink our position in the world rather than continue to expand our military to the point of absurdity. American arrogance Greider is one of a very few American journalists who has for a long time violated the standard American taboos. He notes the arrogance that pervades the thinking of the American elite and their “super-patriot” followers, as well as the taboo against challenging that arrogance: We Americans have many outstanding qualities but, let’s face it, humility is not one of them… When people like me come along and suggest that our claim on sole world leadership is no longer valid and may be dangerous for the country, it sounds to many like heresy, maybe even treason. But I and others like me are arguing from the perspective of a different American tradition – a self-critical and tough-minded tradition that could be called patriotic realism… A major theme of his book is that we’d better get over this arrogance and find a better way to deal with the world, or else we’re going to pay an awful price for it: America as “number one” is over. The United States is headed for a fall, a great comeuppance that will impose wrenching changes on our society and deliver humiliating blows to our national pride… In spite of their reluctance to speak of this honestly, I have a sense that many Americans – perhaps most of them – know this is happening… A nation blinded by the arrogance of its own power may eventually wind up… lunging after delusional solutions and searching for scapegoats to blame… REASONS FOR U.S. DECLINE In chapter three, Greider discusses five reasons for the coming fall. I’ll just discuss just four of them here, since, as Greider points out, one of them, globalization, globalization, can be easily compensated for through domestic economic policies. Militarism According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S. spent $711 on its military in 2008, which amounted to nearly half of the military spending in the world:  Consequently, Greider’s statement that the uses of our military “have been expanded far beyond the original idea of national defense” should be self evident. Today the major purpose of our military spending is the enrichment of our military industrial complex and the domination of much of the rest of the world. Our preemptive invasion of Iraq demonstrates this point as well as any. Here was a military action that only the most delusional could honestly characterize as self-defense. Nor was the idea that its purpose was to bring democracy to the Iraqi people any more credible – in light of the million dead Iraqis, four million refugees, and anti-American hatred caused by our invasion and occupation, as demonstrated by this not atypical reaction from an “unknown Iraqi girl”: People are seething with anger… Every newspaper you pick up in Baghdad has pictures of some American or British atrocity or another. It's like a nightmare that has come to life. Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places… American and British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like, "True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but…" Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained… In the New Iraq, it's "guilty until proven innocent”… Why is no one condemning this? … You've seen the troops break down doors and terrify women and children… curse, scream, push, pull and throw people to the ground with a boot over their head. You've seen troops shoot civilians in cold blood. You've seen them bomb cities and towns. You've seen them burn cars and humans using tanks and helicopters… I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can – while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We’ll take our chances – just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go. Yet, there is no acknowledgement of the underlying problem by the American elite. Greider points out: After the disastrous invasion of Iraq, politicians and policy thinkers argued about whether “mistakes” were made, but very few were willing to oppose the assumption that the United States has the right to invade another country based only on our own justifications…. The end result is that we arouse the hatred of the Muslim world, waste hundreds of billions of dollars to combat that hatred, and ruin our international reputation and standing among former allies – all at the same time. None of this augers well for the future of our nation. Free market ideology The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was characterized by government intervention in the economic life of our country on an unprecedented scale. Those interventions brought our country out of the Great Depression, created the American Middle Class, and led to what Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls “the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history”. But with the advent of the Reagan Revolution in 1981, characterized by a return to the “free market” ideology of the Gilded Age, the process reversed itself. Since that time, except for a brief respite during the latter years of the Clinton presidency, the income of American workers has been virtually stagnant, despite large increases in American productivity which has greatly enriched the already wealthy. The reign of “free-market” ideology has been characterized by an ideological ban against government intervention in economic matters to help those who most need it, which has played out domestically and internationally. Greider explains how this played out on the international stage: The World Trade Organization enforces rules that protect capital investors and corporations, but it has no rules protecting workers and communities, that is, people. The so-called Washington Consensus – a stern dogma imposed on developing countries that borrow from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund preaches that national governments must not try to protect their people from the harsh side effects of capital and commerce. America’s representative democracy, meanwhile, is offered as the model the world should follow, despite the democratic breakdown that Americans well know is in progress…. Greider mentions globalization as another of the factors contributing to the demise of the United States. However, he also notes that other nations are affected by globalization just as much as the United States is, and yet: The advanced economies of Europe and Asia do not adhere to the economic policy prescriptions of Washington or Wall Street. Japan, Germany, France, and most other successful industrial nations pursue their national interest in the global economy quite differently than the United States does. They also get very different results – including less economic inequality – because their systems shield citizens and society from the harsher effects of market capitalism. James Galbraith, in his book, “The Predator State”, explains why globalization and free trade agreements need not cause serious adverse effects for American workers: The populist objective is to raise American wages, create American jobs, and increase the fairness and security of our economic system… Is there a better way to do this…? Of course there is – and that is to do it directly. You want higher wages? Raise them. You want more and better jobs? Create them. The decline of American democracy With the increasing role of money in politics and the increase in the income gap to unprecedented levels, our elected representatives have become relatively much more focused on serving the needs of wealthy individuals and corporations, to the exclusion of other people. Greider explains: The political system that allows powerful interests to exercise virtual veto power over major reforms is not a new condition. But the stakes of failure and paralysis are much higher today because the country is on far more dangerous ground… The status quo is stuck, deformed by the concentration of power… We may want to ask ourselves whether the great accumulations of wealth and power actually deliver the “good life” and for whom. The result has been that the biggest divide in American politics today is no longer between the two major parties: One crippling divide in American public life is the great gulf between the authority of the government experts and the rest of us. That separation is far more damaging than the much lamented partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans. Many Americans, and probably most, are effectively disenfranchised – cut out of the democratic process… Under both Democrats and Republicans, the US government first and foremost promotes and defends the fortunes of America’s multinational corporations and financial firms. If the multinationals are winning in the global competition, then it is assumed that America is winning. That assumption is clearly wrong…. Global environmental crises The challenges of the environmental crises will affect the whole world. And yet, on a relative scale, they are likely to most severely affect the United States. Greider explains why: We are particularly vulnerable, first because our society consumes more than any other nation and is wasteful on a bloated scale, and second because the United States lags far behind other advanced nations in developing ways to cope with the well understood imperatives. Global warming is the greatest and most obvious danger, but it is compounded by the overall destruction of nature as industrial capitalism steadily encroaches upon and undermines the finite capacities of the land, air, water, and ecosystems needed to support all life on earth. THE HEALING POWER OF DEMOCRACY Greider chooses to take an optimistic viewpoint and believe that our democratic foundations could help to pull us out of our crisis. It is not that Americans are uniquely virtuous and wise. We definitely are not. We get things terribly wrong and ignore intolerable transgressions. Our saving grace lies in the hope for the self-correction a functioning democracy can achieve when people make themselves heard… Like any other people, we harbor good stuff within us, but also foul qualities that go against our proclaimed values and lead to destructive errors. The human condition is not perfectible. But democracy can alter social arrangements and economic circumstances in ways that help people uncover their better selves…. Therefore, a major theme of Greider’s book is that improving upon our democratic system will be a prerequisite for our salvation. He suggests that we should not hope that an American president will make a big difference. Our newly elected president’s victory and inauguration have stirred the national spirit… but during the campaign Barack Obama did not stray far from the accepted assumptions about the American condition…. The ominous historical circumstances moving against the nation pose adversities that dwarf any single leader. One damaging myth Americans ought to abandon is the naïve notion that the celebrity power of the presidency can somehow solve our problems… First, the new leader is built up with miraculous powers, then cast down when he fails to prevail… Consequently, if there is any hope for solving our problems it will have to come from ourselves. The first step is to recognize the problem and be honest about it: Democracy begins within the self by thinking and saying what we truly feel and believe, even if only among our family members and close friends… It starts with people asking themselves gut-level questions… What are the private dreams you may be too shy to share outside the family? … Talk about… what makes you feel good about being an American. What makes you sad or angry. This is the raw material for thinking like a citizen. If you had the power to change the country for the better, where would you start? … GROW UP, AMERICA The title for Greider’s book, “Come Home, America”, was borrowed from the George McGovern presidential campaign of 1972, which in turn was borrowed from Martin Luther King. In my opinion, those are two great American heroes, if for no other reason than that they had the courage to talk bluntly about the problems that our nation faced. McGovern suffered through one of the worst presidential election landslides in American history, and King was assassinated. As Greider says, talking about our nation’s faults has never been very popular in this country – as necessary as it may be. But even the phrase “Come home, America” somewhat sugarcoats the reality of the matter. That phrase implies that there was a time when our country came close to achieving its ideals. At the end of chapter four, Greider portrays what is probably a more accurate analogy: I think a better word for what’s facing America is “maturity”. Remember, this country of ours is still quite young as nations go… and we are still developing in many ways… This is a critical stage in human development, and for our nation it could go either way. Some nations that acted like willful children when they were young formed balanced societies when they became adults. Other nations have never really grown up. The question, I think, is whether we can mature as a society. The country can develop a deeper sense of what matters most in life and what doesn’t. It can shed some self-destructive reflexes and acquire a wiser sense of national self-interest that is anchored in the nations’ ideals. Either we do that, or else we could go through the hell that some older nations went through: Older societies… possess something Americans typically lack – historical memory. They remember what can happen when utopian ideologies are in the saddle. They experienced the social destruction and moral debauchery that arose when an extreme idea imposed its will. Whole sectors of society were first marginalized and then decimated. Civilized values were destroyed, along with the order of law and individual freedom. It was called fascism… With modern weaponry and the grave crises facing the world today, that road could mean the end of world civilization as we know it. |
U.S. Democracy in Crisis
Time for change  The Democratic Underground was born on one of the worst days in U.S history – The day that the worst President in U.S. history took office. Now, here we are 8 years later, and we’ve managed to remove that cancer from our nation and replace it with something much better. Notwithstanding my many ambivalent feelings towards President Obama, I have no doubt that he will be infinitely better for our country than his predecessor. Yet despite that, our country has been terribly scarred from the events of the past eight years, and it continues to suffer from all of the root problems that brought us the worst President in our history in 2000 and 2004. Therefore, it is worth taking a look at the root problems that brought us to this sorry state of affairs. MAJOR IMPEDIMENTS TO DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES One thing that we must keep in mind when considering our current problems is that they are not new. They were greatly exacerbated by eight years of Bush administration misrule, but they did not start with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Money in politics All but the most naïve of the American citizenry know that the wealthy and powerful in our country routinely influence our local and national elections through huge campaign contributions. And they also know that they are generally well rewarded for their “contributions”. And they also know that bribery is presumably against the law in our country. Yet, on the rare occasion that our politicians are actually accused of bribery, our news media makes a great big deal over it, as if bribery is actually a rare event in American politics. The end result is that a great many of our politicians do everything they can to make their wealthiest constituents happy with them, at the expense of everyone else. They do that with the knowledge that the voters they lose in doing so will be more than compensated for by the disinformation that will be paid for by their wealthiest constituents. I discuss this situation in more detail here, here, and here. There are a few dots to connect here, but any reasonable assessment of American politics tells us that bribery is routinely used to buy and sell elections in our country. So routine is it that it is actually built into our system and legalized. But that fact is never overtly spoken of. To do so would imply that our system of government is as much or more an aristocracy than it is a democracy. Bill Moyers, in his book “Moyers on Democracy”, explains the situation bluntly: We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”. Let’s call it what it is: a bribe. The legality of contributing money to political candidates, with the implicit (though not explicit) understanding that that money will buy political favoritism, has been defended by both our courts and our Congress by sanctimoniously pointing to the free speech provisions in the First Amendment to our Constitution and claiming that money is speech. But the absurdity of that contention should be obvious to anyone with some primary school education. Speech is of value from a political standpoint (or any other standpoint) only when it is heard. But if one billionaire has one thousand times as much opportunity to speak through a medium which reaches millions than several thousand other people added together, the speech of that one billionaire will drown out the speech of most other people, thereby interfering with their right to free speech. Election fraud Electronic vote switching with DRE (direct-recording electronic) machines poses a great danger to the integrity of our election system – by virtue of its ability to switch a voter’s vote without being noticed by the voter. In other words, someone tries to vote for John Kerry, and the machine registers a vote for George Bush instead. What makes matters worse is that many or most of these machines don’t even produce a piece of paper with the vote on it, which can then later be used for a recount. So, if fraud is suspected there is no recourse. And worse yet is the fact that most of these machines use proprietary (secret) code to determine who the voter voted for. We know for a fact that vote-switching occurred in the 2004 election. One study, based on voter reports to the national Electronic Incident Reporting System (EIRS), showed that vote switching incidents favored Bush over Kerry by a ratio of 12 to 1 nationally. A similar study showed that these vote switching incidents that favored Bush were 9 times as common in the heavily contested “swing states” than in non-swing states. To make the point that the EIRS reports represent only a small fraction of actual Election Day problems, an investigation by the Washington Post identified about 25 electronic voting machines in Youngstown, Mahoning County, Ohio, that were said to have been switching votes all day long. Yet only eight incidents of this nature from Mahoning County (all in favor of Bush) were reported to EIRS that day. Clint Curtis, a computer programmer working in Florida prior to the 2004 election, testified before the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee that he was requested in 2000 by his boss (at the request of a high level Republican operative, Tom Feeney) to “develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable”. Curtis’ testimony was followed by the death of Raymond Lemme, who while investigating Curtis’ allegations 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”, Another type of election fraud is the illegal purging of registered voters from the voter rolls. Like vote switching, the increasing computerization of voter registration is no doubt making it much easier to perpetrate this type of fraud on a mass basis. This article describes a great deal of evidence that voter registration fraud played a major role in the 2004 presidential election, and in fact was probably the deciding factor in Ohio, which gave George Bush his electoral victory. Similarly, although the 2000 presidential election was stolen by a variety of means, voter registration fraud was quantitatively the most important method used. In 2000, the Florida Governor’s office used a computer program to purge tens of thousands of mostly black and Democratic voters. There are many other means of election fraud that have been used in our country to destabilize our democracy. I discuss this issue in more detail, along with means for preventing election fraud, in this post. Our corporate news media If cash donated to their political campaigns is not enough to carry them through to victory, and if election fraud doesn’t happen to play a significant role, the corporate news media serves as another valuable tool for those seeking to sabotage our democracy. This problem overlaps with the role of money in politics, since those who own and control the corporate media are uniformly wealthy, and since it was their money that led to the acts that enabled our corporate media to become what it is today – Ronald Reagan’s veto of Democratic legislation to enforce the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This legislation allowed the monopoly consolidation of our news media to the point where today it is controlled by a very small number of extremely wealthy individuals. Several excellent books have been written about the extent to which wealthy corporate interests control our news media today. I would highly recommend “Lapdogs – How the Press rolled Over for Bush”, by Eric Boehlert, “What Liberal Media – The Truth About BIAS and the News”, by Eric Alterman, and “Into the Buzzsaw – The Myth of a Free Press”, edited by Kristina Borjesson. And I have ranted about pseudo-journalists such as Tim Russert, who have made a largely successful, but hypocritical effort to appear unbiased to their viewers. The bottom line, as Bill Moyers points out, is that the protection offered us by our First Amendment is based on the assumption of a separation of our government and a free press, which is supposed to protect us from government abuses. Moyers wrote this during the Bush administration: What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state. Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know. Secrecy in government Democracy suffers terribly when a nation’s citizens are uninformed – especially when they are uninformed with respect to the actions and motivations of their own government. If we don’t know what our government is doing, then how can we be expected to vote them out when they do something that we would consider deeply immoral had we known about it? Consider war for example. If Americans understood the real motivations for its nation’s wars, they would probably be much more likely to strenuously object to those wars. That would make war much less politically feasible, and our country would therefore be led into war much less frequently than it has been in the past. That is why I so hate the “national security” excuse for withholding information from us, the American people – which has become so routine that it is willingly or passively accepted by the good majority of Americans. I very much doubt that the “national security” excuse for withholding information from the American people has anything to do with national security more than 5% of the time. Rather, the reason for withholding such information from us is almost always something totally different. It is to blind us to the real reasons for war or other nefarious acts, so that we will accept them and willingly support or even risk our lives in their cause. Rampant U.S. nationalism and the GAME Two months ago I wrote a DU post that I titled “The GAME”, which I began by discussing “Unmentionable things in U.S. politics” – including such things as the stealing of a U.S. presidential election, calling American military or covert actions immoral rather than merely “misguided”, and imputing bad intentions rather than mere incompetence to a U.S. president. I find this to be terribly repressive, not because I personally can’t mention these things, but because our elected representatives are under tremendous pressure not to discuss them. We elect them to represent us and our nation, and except for some rare courageous exceptions such as Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, and Robert Wexler, they refuse to even talk about some of our very most important issues. It has occurred to me that this provides the backdrop for a huge GAME that has been foisted upon us. A prerequisite 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. Although the GAME’s masters set the rules, there are two related character traits of many Americans that cause them to play along: Rampant nationalism and a propensity for denial. Rampant nationalism is the attitude that our country is inherently better than any other country – so much so that it can do no wrong. This attitude is drummed into the American people from the time that most of us learn how to talk. We are made to feel that to believe or speak otherwise demonstrates a dangerous lack of “patriotism”, which makes us deserving of being shunned – or worse. The other character trait that persuades too many Americans to play the GAME is denial. Believing terrible things about one’s country can be very painful. Accepting reality as it is, rather than as one would like it to be, can be very painful. To make this point, in a recent post titled “12 Things that Never Happened in American History”, I discuss the following official stories that we have been told (or not told): The U.S. is not an imperialist country; FDR’s New Deal was not instrumental in ending the Great Depression; the Cold War was just about fighting totalitarian Communism; JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman; bribery is infrequent in American politics; Iran-Contra was not a criminal abuse of presidential power; U.S. presidential elections cannot be stolen; Bush and Cheney did everything they could to protect us against the 9/11 attacks; the Bush administration’s crimes are not serious enough to warrant impeachment or prosecution; and, we’re barely told about our nation’s killing of more than a million Iraqi civilians, the October Surprise, or Operation Northwoods. CONSEQUENCES These impediments to democracy work together to surrender great amounts of power into the hands of a small number of elites, who use that power in the cause of increasing their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. It is a vicious cycle that is very difficult to break. Here are some of the major tragic consequences. Rampant militarism and illegal aggression against sovereign nations We are so often told how good and pure our nation and its people are that only a minority of Americans are aware of the extent of our many illegal and immoral activities. Many or most who aren’t aware of these activities would be shocked to learn about them and quite resistant to accepting that information as the truth. In myriad instances we have overthrown or assisted in the overthrow of sovereign nations. In the good majority of these instances we have substituted a repressive right wing government for one that was much more responsive to the needs and desires of the nation’s citizenry. Sometimes genocide was used to accomplish our goals. The purpose of these activities has most often been to create a government that is friendlier to the desires of American businesses or corporations – though we always have some sort of rationalization for our actions. In “Excuses for War” I discuss many of the phony excuses that the United States government has used to lead us into war, including its Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the Vietnam War. In “The Roots and Consequences of U.S. Overseas Imperialism” I note or discuss our covert and overt illegal and immoral overthrowing of the sovereign nations of Hawaii (1893), Cuba (1898), Puerto Rico (1898), the Philippines (1899-1902), Nicaragua (1910), Honduras (1911-1912), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), South Vietnam (1963), Chile (1973), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003). In “The Meaning of U.S. Imperialism, Genocide and Militarism” I note U.S. perpetrated genocides, as described in “State of Darkness” by David Model, including our atomic bombing of Japan (1945), those perpetrated against Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954-73), Indonesia (1965), Cambodia (1970-75), Laos (1969-74), and East Timor (1975), and our two wars against Iraq. Other atrocities include our invasion of Cuba in 1961; U.S. Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 to put down a rebellion against their repressive right wing government; U.S. military support of Haitian tyrant and mass murderer, Francois Duvalier; and numerous brutal interventions in several Latin American and African nations. Massive Income and wealth inequality Inequality of wealth in the United States is truly astounding – and it is increasing at a fast rate. In the United States in 2001, 1% of the population controlled 38% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 40% owned just 1%. That means that, on average, individuals in the top 1% owned about 1,500 times more wealth than individuals in the bottom 40%. The rising level of income inequality in our country recently exceeded the point where it stood just prior to the stock market crash of 1929, which led to the worst depression in U.S. history. There are many who see a connection between the income inequality preceding that depression and our current situation. This graph, which plots income inequality measured as the ratio between the average income of the top 0.01% of U.S. families compared to the bottom 90%, over time, makes that point. I discuss the subject of income and wealth inequality here, here, and here. The loss of the rule of law During the Bush Presidency I often argued that he should be impeached for his many crimes. Now that he can no longer be impeached, I have argued that our Justice Department should prosecute him for those crimes, and if it fails to do so then the International Criminal Court (ICC) should step in. While Bush was still President, President Obama weighed in against impeachment, saying that impeachment should be reserved for only the most serious crimes. Now that he is President he has thus far given little or no indication that he intends to have his Justice Department prosecute George Bush or any other high level Bush administration official for their crimes. But if widespread torture, an illegal war of aggression, spying on American citizens, suspending of the right of habeas corpus, and numerous other violations of our Constitution don’t constitute serious crimes, then what does? What would people say if a prosecuting attorney failed to prosecute a rapist and murderer simply because he had high level political connections? Who would accept that? Then why when far more serious crimes are committed by a President of the United States are there so many people who seem to think that it is ok to sit passively by and make no attempt to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes? I’ll tell you why. It’s like I said earlier in this post. Saying that a former U.S. President might be guilty of prosecutable crimes is simply against the rules of the GAME. Given that and the failure to hold the Reagan administration accountable for its Iran-Contra crimes, George Bush and Dick Cheney connected the dots and thought that they might be able to get away with just about anything. Testing that assumption by moving ahead with prosecutions might be politically risky for the Obama administration. The Republican Party would no doubt raise holy hell if there was an attempt to prosecute high level Bush administration officials. Consequently, we live in country in which, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, certain people are indeed above the law. That fact, taken together with all of the impediments to democracy discussed in the first part of this post, means that democracy and the rule of law in our country are in grave danger. Indeed, some believe that we narrowly averted a military coup perpetrated by the Bush administration. The American people and their leaders need to reassess what our country stands for. Is our democracy important enough to take steps to remove the role of money in politics, reform our election system, break up the corporate monopoly on our news media, require government actions to be much more transparent than they now are, and dare to look more objectively at who we are and what we do? Can we give up imperialism and warfare for the sake a world in which nations live and work together to further the cause of peace and justice? Can we make our nation one in which all of its citizens truly have the opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And do our laws apply to all people, not just to those who lack the political influence to avoid them? If we think that these things are important we have a great deal of work to do, lest our country sinks into a tyranny from which it may never recover. Profile Information Time for change
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the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums. A great beakdown of Psalm 109... By shoopnyc DOGS: Dangerous people foods. If you have a dog, read. By roguevalley Humans are funny squishy meatbags By UndertheOcean Ravens form a wake-like gathering after 2 electrocuted By roguevalley Are you committing career suicide? By SoCalDem Carlos Santana is my hero! By medeak Heroes of the economy: Paycuts prevented layoffs By Liberal_in_LA TYT: White House Deal w/ Drug Companies = Failure By democracy1st I'm sorry, son. A work of semi-fiction By WillBowden |
