THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE - The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: A Book Proposal

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THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE

The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: A Book Proposal

Posted by Time for change in General Discussion
Tue Mar 15th 2011, 08:57 PM

The major key to breaking and reversing the vicious cycle of government corruption and destruction of our democratic safeguards lies in an accumulating awareness of the American people about the true nature of their nation’s history and current stat

One of the worst aspects of the United States of America is the disinformation that constantly bombards its citizens. Perhaps that’s true of all countries of the world – but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable. There have been, of course, many journalists, authors, and statesmen throughout our history who have attempted to buck the establishment and speak truth to power. But never without severe obstruction or consequences. Chris Hedges discusses this problem at length in his book, “Death of the Liberal Class”. His discussion of the rise, fall, and rise of one of our greatest journalists, I.F. Stone, is very interesting, informative, scary, and inspiring at the same time:

I.F. Stone… was one of the most famous reporters in the nation by the end of World War II. He was a regular on television news programs and had easy access to those in power… And he was a confidant of many in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

And then, challenging President Harry Truman’s loyalty program and the establishment of NATO, Stone disappeared from public view and was swallowed up in the hysteria over communism. He became a nonperson… He was soon under daily FBI surveillance… He was blacklisted as a reporter. Even the Nation, the centerpiece of the liberal intelligentsia, would not give him a job. He was forty-four and wrote that such actions made him “feel for the moment like a ghost”.

Stone gathered up a few stalwarts from his old magazine… and launched a newsletter in 1953 called I.F. Stone’s Weekly… He self-published his work in his basement. Stone’s work exposed the damage done to journalism by mass culture. The stories Stone broke were ignored by most organizations. It was Stone who punctured the Johnson administration’s assertion that U.S. ships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin… He found that only 179 of approximately 7,500 weapons captured from the Vietcong had come from the Soviet bloc. The remainder, 95%, came from U.S. arms provided to the South Vietnamese.

He did this reporting while shut out of the big news conferences and confidential background briefings given to well-placed Washington reporters. The establishment reporters, he conceded, knew things he did not, but “a lot of what they know isn’t true”… By the time he closed the weekly nearly two decades later, it had seventy thousand subscribers, and he had become a journalistic icon… Stone would not sell out. He never forgot, as he famously quipped, that “every government is run by liars”…

It is only when radicals such as Stone exist that the commercial media wake from their slumber. Figures like Stone, in essence, shame the press into good journalism….

And let’s not forget about the treatment of Bradley Manning.

If I were to write a book in an attempt to make some small contribution to waking up the American public to the problems we face as a nation, this is how I might write the introduction:

INTRODUCTION

The United States of America was conceived on July 4, 1776, with our Declaration of Independence, one of the finest and most important proclamations ever written. It is basically a proclamation against tyranny. It proclaims that all of humanity – not just Americans, but all of humanity – has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Then it justifies the creation of our nation by noting that it is the purpose of government to secure the inalienable rights of its citizens, and that government derives its legitimacy only from the consent of those whom it governs. Therefore, whenever a government becomes destructive of that purpose, it is the moral right of its citizens to abolish that government.

Notwithstanding the lofty sentiments and purpose of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the reality did not then – and still has not – lived up to its ideal. Most obvious in this regard was the institution of slavery, which in some respects made a mockery of the sentiments expressed in our Declaration. Yet, it was a great start, and it served then – as it still does – to shine as a beacon of hope for our infant nation, and the rest of the world as well.

The dark side of the United States of America

Since its founding, the actions of the United States of America during its almost two and a half centuries of existence, like most if not all the other nations of the world, contain a mixture of good and bad – actions noble and ignoble. Yet most written histories of the United States emphasize the good things while overlooking much of the bad. This is especially true of the teaching of U.S. history to students.

In that respect the United States is probably not much different from other nations and cultures of the world. Most or all nations and cultures have a strong tendency to describe their histories and current actions in an exaggerated favorable light. In that way they attempt to elicit the cooperation or enthusiastic participation of their members or citizens. If people believe that their nation’s goals are noble and inspiring they will be inclined to cooperate with those goals willingly. Many of them will even willingly risk their lives by going to war in order to further the goals of their nation. Even many of those who don’t fully believe in the nobility of their nation’s goals will be moved by peer pressure to willingly fight for them. Obtaining the willing cooperation and enthusiastic participation of its citizens in furthering their goals is almost always far preferable to a nation’s leaders than trying to obtain that cooperation by force.

Most people prefer it this way. Doing and believing what they are told by their leaders is easier than developing their own beliefs and plotting their own independent course of action based on an independent assessment of the value of what they are advised to do. Furthermore, in following the prodding of their leaders, people can make themselves feel that they are acting “patriotically”. It helps to give them a sense of identity, feel a connection to their fellow citizens and feel good about themselves.

But there are very important downsides to this kind of relationship between a nation and its citizens. The “noble” actions portrayed by the leaders may not be noble at all. Instead, they may – and often are – designed for the enrichment and private satisfaction of the leaders. They may – and often do – have terrible consequences for hundreds, thousands, or millions of other people, including those whose participation in their goals they endeavor to elicit. In short, nations can – and often have – evolved into tyranny.

The end result can be that a nation’s government creates a system in which masses of people are led around and manipulated like sheep – all for the benefit of the leaders, at the great expense of everyone else. The sheep see themselves as benefiting because they are spared the necessity of doing the hard work of thinking for themselves, and because they are manipulated into feeling good about themselves.

Just as an individual cannot grow if he is unwilling to recognize his faults, a nation cannot improve if its citizens are unwilling to look at and seriously consider the dark side of their nation’s history and current actions. It may be very painful for some to do that. But it is necessary in order to facilitate the development of a nation that works for the benefit of all its citizens rather than exclusively for its leaders.

Politicians against historians – The attack on “National Standards for United States History”

A great example of how politically dangerous it is to challenge the standard feel good stories told about our country is the U.S. Senate’s unanimous rejection, in 1995, of the proposed National Standards for United States History, by a vote of 99-1 (The one vote against the resolution was cast because the Senator felt that the resolution wasn’t strong enough.)

Creation of the standards
The standards were produced by a policy-setting body called the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), consisting of the presidents of nine major organizations and twenty-two other nationally recognized administrators, historians, and teachers, and two taskforces of teachers in World and United States history, with substantial input from thirty-one national organizations. The document was created through an unprecedented process of open debate, multiple reviews, and the active participation of the largest organizations of history educators in the nation.

In November 1994, NCHS released its document, which was meant to provide purely voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12. As explained by Gary Nash, who led the effort, these standards were meant to have one thing in common: “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools.” Their signature features were said to include “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”.

Controversy over the standards
Critics focused largely on two main issues: Multiculturalism and so-called “political correctness”. As an example, Lynn Cheney aggressively criticized the document as containing “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, “a politicized history”, and a disparaging of the West. Other major critics of the document included Newt Gingrich and Republican presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole. Dole blamed the document on “the embarrassed to be American crowd” of “intellectual elites”. With regard to the criticisms of “grimness and gloominess”, Nash has this to say:

To be sure, it is not possible to recover the history of women, African Americans, religious minorities, Native Americans, laboring Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans without addressing issues of conflict, exploitation, and the compromising of the national ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation… To this extent, the standards counseled a less self-congratulatory history of the United States and a less triumphalist Western Civilization orientation toward world history…

Reduced to its core, the controversy thus turned on how history can be used to train up the nation's youth. Almost all of the critics of the history standards argued that young Americans would be better served if they study the history presented before the 1960s, when allegedly liberal and radical historians "politicized" the discipline and abandoned an "objective" history in favor of pursuing their personal political agendas.

Nash then discusses the historians’ point of view:

On the other side of the cultural divide stands a large majority of historians. For many generations, even when the profession was a guild of white Protestant males of the upper class, historians have never regarded themselves as anti-patriots because they revise history or examine sordid chapters of it. Indeed, they expose and critique the past in order to improve American society and to protect dearly won gains… This is not a new argument. Historians have periodically been at sword's point with vociferous segments of the public, especially those of deeply conservative bent.

So why then did the U.S. Senate unanimously reject these standards? Well, the last thing our leaders want is for our children to be taught a “grim and gloomy portrayal” of American History, as Lynn Cheney describes the Standards. There were probably some U.S. Senators who appreciated the value of these standards – as they voted to reject them. But they know that failing to vote with their colleagues to reject them would be greatly frowned upon by the powers that be and result in their being targeted for a political hatchet job and even political extermination. A system for teaching history to school children that rocks the boat by questioning the motives of our great leaders is just too threatening to our nation’s leaders to be allowed to exist.

The purpose of the book

My purpose in writing this book is to encourage American citizens to think more about the dark side of their nation’s history, current policies and current directions – in the belief that this is the surest way to make us better than who we are today.

Our history has been a mixture of wise and stupid, moral and immoral actions. Yet, most Americans are led to believe that we are so far superior to the other peoples of the world that we have the moral right to force them to do whatever we believe to be in our best interests – which we claim to be in the best interests of everyone. Such an attitude is arrogant, hypocritical and dangerous in the extreme.

Worse, we are moving swiftly in the wrong direction. A minority of very wealthy and powerful people – an elite oligarchy – has concentrated more and more power and wealth into their own hands, and they continue to do so. In the midst of the worst economic crisis our country has known since the Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of thousands of Americans die every year because they can’t afford decent health care, millions lose their homes, and millions are driven into poverty, while those institutions and individuals responsible for the crisis make record profits and take home multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses.

To distract us from the true cause of our crisis, the oligarchy tries to turn us against each other. As I write this book, the Governor of Wisconsin is attempting to demonize and destroy the public employees unions in his state. This is one part of an ongoing war against American labor unions – one of the last bastions of hope for the working people of our country.

An outline of some things Americans need to better understand

The following outline is not meant to be all-inclusive. Rather, it is meant to serve as a counter-balance for a population that has mostly been exposed to sanitized versions of U.S. history and current U.S. policies:

I. Dark Aspects of U.S. History

Slavery and imperialism

Slavery
The Indian wars
Imperial expansion mid-19th to early 20th century
Cold War
Post Cold War

Economic history and class warfare

The Gilded Age
The war against Labor
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidency – Effort to reign in corporate abuse
The war against Socialism
FDR’s New Deal and the reaction of right wing reactionaries
The greatest economic boom in U.S. history
Demise of the New Deal beginning with Reagan’s presidency
NAFTA and the “free market”
Wall Street bailout and related subservience to Wall St.

II. Dark aspects of 21st Century developments

The “War on Terror”
Economic policy and class warfare
The “War on Drugs”
Discrimination against minority groups
The War on science
Disrespect for international law
Right wing efforts to destroy health care reform
Deteriorating planetary environment
The prison industry

III. Factors responsible for the decline of U.S. democracy

In summary

The problems facing our country and the world are enormous. Unfortunately, we are now at a time in U.S. history when anti-democratic forces in our country are accelerating, leading to the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, as our nation’s previous robust middle class continues to shrink and become more and more insecure. In many respects this represents a vicious downward cycle. The more power accumulated by the oligarchy, the more power they have to accumulate more power and successfully demand the passage of legislation that adds still more to their increasing power and wealth.

One important key to breaking and reversing this downward vicious cycle lies in an accumulating awareness of the American people about the true nature of their nation’s history and current status. Finding ways to facilitate this task is one of the greatest and most important challenges of the 21st Century.

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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.

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