Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog [6],
Where are you going, America?
I don’t like to discuss politics too much. There are not enough smart, kind and honest people in politics wherever I look in the world for me to want to have anything to do with that game. I’d just spend all my time wondering what kind of mindset it takes to want to tell other people what to do, and be in control of the millions, billions and trillions of dollars that are taken from these people on a daily, yearly, basis.
Not that all politicians are bad, but those who have genuinely good intentions get drowned out, within seconds, by the ones for whom the need to have power over others is more important than anything else. And as I said, on the whole they’re not very smart. It’s for instance a very bad idea to let your countries’ economic policies be decided by the very people who make the decisions today.
They have no clue what they’re talking about. So they get advisors who they feel do know, and these advisors all come from the same small niche of society that steer everybody’s hard-earned cash towards that same small niche of society. 99% of economists are religious nuts who do even the Roman Catholic church one better because they chart graphs to ‘prove’ their beliefs are true -or even provable.
They adapt the world to their theories, not the other way around, as physicists do. They pretend their field is a science, but, other than the graphs, it has none of the characteristics of a science. Falsifiability is not a term one can let loose on economics; within minutes, there’d be nothing left.
The other advisors politicians have when it comes to economic policies are bankers, who are convinced banks are the most important institutions and edifices in the world, just like priests and vicars would have described their churches and cathedrals not long ago. That is why last week we saw a spending bill being shoved through US Congress and Senate that includes parts openly written by Citigroup lobbyists, and which puts the risk of over $300 trillion in derivatives on American taxpayers’ shoulders.
America is a democracy in name only. And I often ask myself why Americans take that lying down. Why they think they don’t have to fight for their rights and their freedoms the way the founders did. Do they think they’re special, are they so full of themselves, and full of ‘it’, that they think it’s okay to let their rights being taken away from them, and their children, the same rights so many Americans died for in earlier days?
When you try and see things that way, what else do present day US citizens deserve than what’s coming to them? You can’t have freedom, and you can’t have rights, if you’re not willing to fight for them. And that doesn’t mean sending a bunch of your low-down poorest young people to some faraway desert, it means keeping in touch with what’s happening in your own town and county and state and country. And raising your voice if you don’t like what you see.
There’s a Senate report – many years too late – that confirms the CIA and other parties tortured often innocent people in the name of the United States, and that means you, in incredibly cruel ways reminiscent perhaps most of Medieval times or even before that, before man allegedly became civilized, but for which, by the looks of it, nobody will to be prosecuted in the US.
Letting people die of torture, and then afterwards finding out it was just another case of mistaken identity, has become acceptable in America. Congratulations. We’ve come a long way.
There’s the incredible story of the Ukraine, in which the Senate just days ago called for more economic sanctions vs Russia, and full-blown lethal military aid for Ukraine, where US patsies have taken over even more government positions by being handed hundreds of millions of dollars and fresh Kiev passports, and where now Russia will be forced to counteract, against its will.
Why do Americans allow for that to happen in their name? Don’t they care what other people in the world, in which they’re hugely outnumbered, since less than 1 in 20 is American, think about them? Don’t they care about the effect of harassing others incessantly for the purpose of enriching US companies?
Or do Americans think their superior weaponry allows them to do whatever they want to whoever they want to do it to? Somehow, that, too, is reminiscent of the Middle Ages. America hasn’t won an actual war since 1945, because bigger armies don’t win wars anymore. Having the biggest guns doesn’t either. Nuclear weapons are too destructive for that.
Ron Paul seems to be the only US politician who has any idea of what the US should stand for, who understands that empire building is a really bad idea with all the nukes around, and that coalition building and friendship with other peoples and nations is a much better way to keep Americans safe and -relatively – prosperous. And Ron Paul is getting on; who’ll stand up in his place?
But the biggest issues for Americans are not abroad, they’re right at home. As evidenced by Ferguson, by Eric Garner, and by the mass demonstrations in the past days. The problem is, since the 1960s people have turned their focus so much towards money and so far away from their personal rights and freedoms, and those of others, that one or two or ten demonstrations won’t make a difference anymore.
I was watching something on the 1964 Klan killing of three civil rights workers in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi the other day, of Dr. King’s role, of how the entire town knew who was guilty but shut up. And I wondered what exactly America has achieved since then, what has changed and what is better 50 years on.
And sure enough I found my answer, in a graph of all places. It this doesn’t hurt your sense of justice, and your sense of pride to be an American, I don’t know what would. Nor do I understand, if you choose to keep silent, where you think this will lead in the future. What can you possibly say when you let these numbers sink in?
