It’s hard for an American to admit that we have become a country whose President now claims the power to arrest and detain indefinitely – or even order the assassination of — any American citizen that the President – without official charges, trial and conviction – sees as some sort of threat. Future leaders are not likely to give up this power.
We’re in a distinctly American form of plutocracy, where Wall Street’s short-sighted greed has interbred with car-crash journalism and political expediency to create our cultural motto, “What have you done for me lately.” It’s worth asking the sobering question of what poor and middle class people honestly think they can offer politicians and Wall Street’s metastasized profit-makers to compete with Big Money — though the answer isn’t comforting. Sweet liberals may rattle on about a government of, by and for the people, or airy ideals of truth, justice and equality. But that country is a nostalgic dream out of touch with everything except maybe Disney World.
The signs of our times are not warnings of a potential slide into an American version of fascism — wrapped, as Sinclair Lewis said in 1935, in the American flag and waving a cross. The signs are of a nation whose government has already passed the point of no return, from a nominal democracy or republic into a de facto tyranny. It’s been decades since doing the right thing could trump doing the profitable thing.
The death throes of our American Empire are spastic, furious and futile. Michael Moore – but not our politicians or mainstream media — has reminded us that America is actually fighting not two wars, but six: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, the horn of Africa and Columbia – that we know of. Wars are cash cows for the military-industrial-congressional-media complex. Our soldiers are equipped with sophisticated weaponry that is as ill-suited to fighting a guerilla war as it was in Vietnam a half century ago. We’re maintaining around 800 military bases in other countries, spending about $1,000,000 a year per soldier in Iraq. This is happening as we sink more deeply in debt, and have become the obvious financial target of opportunity for China, who can send us into a nearly bottomless Depression any time they decide they will no longer buy our Treasury bonds.
http://my.firedoglake.com/davidson/2010/12/26/truth-seeks-light-evil-loves-the-dark/
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