Joseph Marohl

The 2009 CIA World Factbook¹ estimates that the USA ranks 180 (out of 224 nations) in infant mortality rates. The number 1 country for infant deaths is Angola. Like most of the nations with higher rates, Angola is an impoverished “developing” country. The USA, however, has a greater number of deaths in infancy than Cuba, the European Union, Taiwan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Israel, Hong Kong, Japan, or Singapore (which has the lowest infant mortality rate).

The “World Factbook” further estimates that, in 2008, the USA had 8.27 deaths per 1,000 people. Its death rate in general, then, is lower than the rates in Japan or the European Union, but still higher than those in Canada, Cuba, China, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, India, South Korea, Chile, Iran, Israel, Iraq, Mexico, Singapore, or the United Arab Emirates (which has the lowest overall mortality rate). Last year, the USA had 3.03 more deaths per 1,000 than Iraq (5.14)!

US citizens have an average life expectancy of 77.85 years, lower than the United Kingdom (78.54), Germany (78.8), France (79.73), Italy (79.81), and Canada (80.22),

According to the New York Times², in 2006 Canadians spent $3,678 per capita on health care. US residents spent $6,714 per capita. (About 38% of that difference can be explained by the difference in the two countries’ economies. But even with numbers adjusted to accommodate that difference, US Americans paid $1,141 more per person for health care than Canadians.)

The “National Coalition on Health Care” states:

“Although nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.”

In 2007, health care spending represented 17% of the gross domestic product of the USA. In 2008, the increase (5%) in employer health insurance premiums was double the rate of inflation. Health care spending in the USA is over four times the amount spent on national defense.

The AFL-CIO reports, “Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, while consumers paid more for less coverage.”

Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna, earned $24,300,112 in 2008, making him the highest paid health insurance company executive. (In 1910 all the corporations in America paid less in taxes [$24,043,500] than Williams earned 98 years later.)

President Obama has introduced and supported the idea of a public option in health insurance coverage, a compromise between the current model of private insurers (as supported by the American Medical Association and fiscal conservatives) and the social-services model of public health (as practiced in Canada, the UK, France, Cuba, and China).

A public health insurance option means that the government would provide health insurance in competition with private health insurers, with the intention of driving down health care costs in America and insuring the millions of Americans now without health coverage of any kind. Only one health insurance provider or a closely tied group of providers covers 94% of metropolitan areas in the USA, with the effect of limiting competition in those communities and driving up healthcare costs. A public option could benefit from having lower administrative costs (Medicare, for instance, provides coverage with a lower overhead than the average private insurer can). If the public option proves popular and competitive, private insurers would likely lower rates to compete.

Centrist Democrats appear to be in a bind because, on one level, there is great popular support for the public option—65-85% of Americans support it, according to a variety of polls—while, on another level, health industry PACs contribute generously to Democratic and Republican campaigns—and (this is awfully cynical, I know) actually doing something about health care in America would rob them of the campaign issue that “somebody ought to do something about health care in America.”

According to Nate Silver, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia has received $69,000 in contributions from health industry political action committees, even though he has served less than six months in the Senate. Like the 20 other senators currently “uncommitted” to a public health insurance option, Warner is a Democrat. (Except for Olympia Snowe, all the Republican senators oppose the public option.)

Opponents assert that a public option would be both inferior to private-sector insurance and destructive to private insurers. Their reasoning is that, although public health care would be (in their opinion) inferior, more people would gravitate to it because of its relatively low cost.

Some people object to a public option on principle, believing that the government should not interfere with lawful free enterprise (especially given the precarious position of the US economy now), and on practical concerns, believing that the government would be a less efficient provider of healthcare benefits than the current private insurers.

Many of these opponents attribute the USA’s lagging health statistics to factors other than the free market and/or monopolies, while others continue to tout the USA’s relatively good health statistics in comparison to nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

I unapologetically support so-called “socialized medicine”—on par with “socialized” highways, postal service, military defense, and public education. I don’t claim that such an approach to health care is perfect and without problems, but it does appear to me that, after decades of comparison, we can see greater benefits in, say, the British National Health Service than we Americans currently enjoy, and greater risks—large numbers of uninsured Americans and increasing bankruptcy due to high healthcare costs—in our current system.

Obama has chosen a compromise that I would not consider desirable—except for political expediency. However, the idea of a “public option” seems better than the status quo, at least—especially given my firsthand experience with increasing insurance premiums and deductibles and the rather shockingly streamlined “drive-thru” (though hardly “fast”) approach of the private medicine I have recently experienced.

Source(s): ¹C.I.A. 2009 World Factbook • ²The New York Times “Why Does U.S. Healthcare Cost so Much? (Part 1)” by Uwe E. Reinhardt/ published November 14, 2008 • ³National Coalition on Health Care “Health Insurance Costs” • ⁴AFL-CIO NOW Blog “Health Insurance Profits Soar as Industry Mergers Create Near-Monopoly” May 27th, 2009 •

The Smoking Argus

Editor’s Note: No official Statement is available from Senator John McCain’s office.

Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona compares the struggle for American Independence to the ongoing protests in Iran. He attempts to oversimplify opposition by stating that those seeking to link the C.I.A. to the current Green Revolution based on the C.I.A.’s 1953 overthrow of then Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq are both cynical and on the wrong side of history. Finally, Senator McCain admonishes the Iranian regime for conducting brutal torture and spreading fear of a feigned foreign enemy as a means to justify a loss of liberty domestically.

Source(s): Senator John McCain’s Official YouTube Channel

The Smoking Argus

“The Century of Self: The Engineering of Consent” is the second part of the award winning documentary by British documentarian Adam Curtis. Whereas he first episode provided insight to the origin of consumerism, this second installment illustrates how  in post-WWII America, many came to believe that the basic animal instincts, as theorized by Sigmund Freud, were the root cause behind the rise of Nazism. Thus, in order to prevent the “animal” ever being unleashed in the future; academics, corporations and governments sought a way to manipulate and “domesticate” the human animal.

Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The United States government, corporations, as well as the C.I.A.   used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. However these were not merely a cynical exercises in manipulation, as those in with the reigns of power believed that the only way to make the world “safe for democracy” and create a stable society was to repress basic human instincts that simmered just under the surface of post-war suburbia.

Jeff Lewis

One of the great lines from Saturday Night Live was delivered many years ago by Martin Short’s brilliant comedic character, “Ed Grimley”, when he described a situation as,” Doomed as doomed can be!” That summarizes my prognosis on the theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. With events of this past week, the disciples of the world’s first cyber revolution have passed the point of no return.

WARNING: Graphic Video

The graphic scene of the young woman, Neda, bleeding to death from a fatal gunshot on the streets of Tehran has become the symbol of the upheaval caused by the controversy surrounding the recent national election. Civilian control apparatus is in high gear as the ruling clerics attempt to quell the insurrection of hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets throughout the country. Wounded demonstrators are being beaten savagely, pulled out of their houses at night, and even arrested at hospitals. Some families trying to reclaim the dead bodies of murdered relatives are being charged a fee for the bullets expended by security forces that remain logged within the victim’s corpse.

The Iranian authorities are taking every step possible in interfering with electronic transmissions from all sources that are broadcasting messages to the world about the emerging atrocities of governmental suppression of the dissenting demonstrators. The Guardian Council issued a statement that there were no fraudulent voting incidents and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, said all those people who continued to demonstrate would be dealt with as traitors.

Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Lindsey Graham (SC) are criticizing Obama’s tepid response as a failure to lead on an issue that should require him to be aggressive in his denunciation of Iran’s rulers. Other Republican members of Congress are carping at Obama about not leading the free world’s outrage over the unfolding events in Iran, notably Mike Pence (R-IN). Representative Pence compared President Obama’s reticence to Ronald Reagan’s bold declaration to Gorbachev regarding tearing down the Berlin Wall, in 1987. Not all Republicans are as quick to demagogue the issue, however. Indiana Senator, Richard Lugar, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, feels Obama is wise to keep his cool, for now, as events continue to unfold. Pat Buchanan, MSNBC’s right wing firebrand, praised Obama’s stance as did Conservative columnist George Will on last Sunday’s ABC regular broadcast. Mr. Will even criticized Obama’s detractors by name.

MSNBC, CNN, and all the major old-media networks, have interviewed dozens of guests including Iranian expatriates, college faculty, and American citizens with family still living in Iran. The old-media has called for America to be supportive of the demonstrators, but not to overplay their hand and provide Ahmadinejad with the excuse to castigate the U.S. as “The Great Satan” that is fueling the discord in their country, as has been done since the 1979 revolution. In his Cairo speech, President Obama admitted the CIA’s role in deposing a popularly elected government in Iran in 1953. Iranians have also not forgotten that the U.S. supported their archenemy, Saddam Hussein, in their brutal war with Iraq in 1982 where over a million Iranians were casualties.

Most of Obama’s critics do not take into account the history of unpopular U.S. involvement in Iran over the last sixty-years. The short sightedness of that view was articulated last Thursday during an interview on MSNBC’s, “Hardball”, with host Chris Matthews and Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss (GA). Senator Chambliss said he thought that America’s previous transgressions against Iran happened long enough ago that they were largely forgotten by the Iranians of today. Matthews missed an opportunity for a great follow up question to Chambliss when he failed to ask the Georgia Senator, “When did Georgians stop remembering General Sherman?”

For his part, President Obama has steadily ramped up his criticism of Iran’s ruling theocracy, but in his news this past Tuesday, he allowed that events are continuing to unfold. However, the days of government by theocracy in Iran are numbered. This youthful generation in Iran, those 30 and under, which amounts to over sixty percent of the country’s total population, are the products of the emerging technology that is changing how the world interacts. It will take several months to make changes in Iran sufficient to quell this culture of the future, but one thing is for certain, history does not have a reverse gear.

China is next.

Allison Bricker

Al-Qaeda’s third in command, Mustafa Abul-Yazeed, said in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera¹ today, that he is praying Taliban forces are able to capture Pakistani nuclear weapons as they continue fighting their way towards Islamabad. In April of this year, Taliban forces captured the “Swat Valley region” and are now approximately sixty-miles outside the Pakistani capitol.

Abul-Yazeed also goes on to say during the interview that hostilities will only cease when the United States removes its forces from all Muslim countries and quits supplying military funding to nations hostile towards Muslims, namely Israel. Foreign policy experts, the C.I.A., and Representative Ron Paul have also cited our interventionist foreign policy as the root cause of what is known as “blowback”, i.e. the motivation to commit acts of terrorism against the United States.

Source(s): ¹ “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edition)” by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, published by:W.W. Norton & Co. July 22, 2004

• ² Al Jazeera News Network, “Al-Qaeda commander threatens US” orignally aired June 22nd, 2009

• ³ “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror” by Michael Scheuer, Potomac Books Inc. March 4, 2005

• ⁴ “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” by Robert Pape Random House Trade Paperbacks – July 25, 2006

• ⁵ “Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” (American Empire Project) by Chalmers Johnson Holt Paperbacks January 4, 2004

Allison Bricker

CAIRO, EGYPT -  In his speech today, President Obama acknowledged and apologized for the United States’ role in the 1953 CIA/British backed overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government. This marks the first time in history that a United States President has ever publicly spoken about U.S. involvement of the 1953 coup. The operation codenamed, Operation Ajax, was a classified CIA mission headed up by Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of former President Theodore Roosevelt tasked with carrying out  a covert regime change of then Prime Minister Mossaddeq’s government. The overthrow came shortly after he [Mossaddeq] nationalized Iranian oil fields which had formerly been under the control of British Petroleum. Operation Ajax would be the first among several successful CIA backed coup d’états.

Former Presidential Candidate and Texas Congressman Ron Paul, spoke to this type of aggressive foreign policy during the 2008 Republican Presidential Primaries. In a now infamous exchange between Dr. Paul and former New York Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, Dr. Paul educated Mayor Giuliani on the 9/11 Commission report’s sentiments and the CIA definition of the word ‘blowback’ as consequences to the continued practice of  suc imperial interventionism.

Source(s): Breitbart “Obama admits US involvement in Iran coup in 1953″ •  CIA.gov “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”

Joseph Marohl

I appreciate the improvement in tone of the Obama administration over its immediate predecessor, for example, Obama’s statement in Turkey that America, though enriched by its Christian population, is “not a Christian nation”; even the President’s espousal of his personal faith has, so far, avoided the arrogant display of ignorance and bullying bluster of Bush.

Obama has lifted bans on stem-cell research and the abortion bans linked under Bush to international aid. On Friday, Obama condemned homophobia in particular no less than intolerance in general in a speech at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum—an inclusiveness that is poignant in light of the surge in gay bashing in the past decade and the growth of hate groups in America since his election.

All these examples speak of a bright new spirit in the leadership and values of our nation.

But President Obama has everything to gain or lose over the issue of whether to investigate those in power who promoted or condoned the use of torture of terror suspects.  So far, he appears to be failing a crucial test of integrity.

Fox TV has repeatedly criticized the President’s release of formerly classified memos showing the government’s deliberate attempt to whitewash torture techniques and to approve specific techniques, namely waterboarding, that have been used as torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition and condemned by American military courts trying foreign war criminals for the past 65 years. Fox TV pundits say that the President’s act is politics, a threat to security, an aid to the nation’s enemies.

The White House has defended its action on the basis that the information had already appeared in the media—in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Besides, precautions were taken to blacken out names, supposedly to protect the innocent or the legally covert. And, unlike the Valerie Plame “outing” in 2003, the White House appears to have little to gain politically from the release of this information.

The burning question is—What does the President intend to do with this information?

In his original statement to the press, Obama exempted CIA operatives who participated in torture but did so with an understanding that they were acting within certain legal bounds. In World War II and other cases, soldiers were prosecuted only for exceeding the bounds of laws existing at the time—“following orders” was a legitimate defense that many Nazis who did not just follow orders tried illegitimately to use to save their necks at Nuremberg.

Obama can reasonably justify not prosecuting low-level personnel—unlike the 2004 attempt to quiet the Abu Ghraib scandal, where investigations and prosecutions did not rise higher than low-ranking GIs.

Then last Sunday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel announced that the Bush policymakers, namely John Yoo and Jay Bybee, whose support of torture is documented in the released memos, would likewise be exempt from further investigation and prosecution. But then later White House aides intimated that the President did “not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.”

Troublingly, in public addresses, Obama has echoed Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s dribble that we should not waste time, money, and energy to “look back” to offenses in the past. (As one commenter to Noonan’s original statement put it: “Great news for hit-and-run drivers.”)

Obama told an enthusiastic crowd of CIA employees, “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.” But the government’s detailing of specific torture techniques and fostering an air of institutional and public acceptance of what it euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” can hardly be called a simple mistake.

On Tuesday, an internal memo by Dennis Blair, Obama’s national intelligence director, was publicized, stating, “High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” Blair seems to support at least the underpinning assumption that the Yoo-Bybee interrogation policy was effective.  Obama, in turn, has left the matter in the hands of Attorney General Eric Holder, who is less shy of the word “torture” and has called for the release of even more memos detailing the U.S. government’s support and defense of torture.

To my mind, torture is a bigger issue than the economy. The cost of investigating and prosecuting those of both political parties who were actively or tacitly behind the senseless, brutal, and unjustified beatings of detainees fraudulently in the name of the American way of life and at the expense of justice-loving American citizens is worth more than ten General Motors and fifty Bank of Americas.

And if we taxpayers could fork out $6.2 million to investigate a blowjob in the Oval Office, we owe at least as much to our sense of ourselves as a just, moral, tolerant, and humane people.

Government funds are at least as justly spent in supporting the rule of law as in supporting military actions abroad and sustaining economic growth.

One of the reasons we elect a President every four years is to permit the opportunity to investigate and legally address the flaws—both simple mistakes and flagrant illegalities—of the previous administration. If he or she does not do so, why bother with term limits or even elections?

Our nation’s much-praised propensity for “smooth transitions” distinctly implies that we transition to something new and different from its precedent—not continuation of the same, and not erasure of recent memories of injustice and lawlessness.

If Obama does not address the wrongs of the previous administration, he betrays the fundamental reason for his (or any new President’s) election: change.

If he does not push the investigation and prosecution of injustices committed in the name of America, he does nothing to build the nation’s reputation for democracy and rule of law.

If he does not look into charges of wrongdoing in the Bush administration, even if he  and (less likely) his political party could remain blameless of those wrongs, he furthers the erosion of American values and liberties and, in this case, leaves torture as a tool for future leaders with a bent towards tyranny and a cruel streak.

Jeff Lewis

This past week we witnessed the “Tea Bag” Tax Protest. It was an orchestrated event that was co-opted, or hijacked by rightwing extremists and Republican conservatives from Ron Paul’s vocal, but normally civilized followers. The purpose for the protest was designed to draw attention, ostensibly, to multiple contemporary evils: excessive taxation, excessive government spending, and excessive insensitivity from our national political leadership.

The “Protest” allowed participants the chance to use inflammatory rhetoric that often characterizes such gatherings.  One of the unique aspects of this cause celeb was the contradictory outcries of “Socialism” and “Fascism”, plus numerous Obama hate messages.  It reminded me of the conundrum one of my innovative professors in college once posed in a political theory lecture that began with the rhetorical question, “Can any one succinctly explain the difference between communism and capitalism?”  After several seconds of deafening silence, he answered by saying, “In Communism, man exploits man.  In Capitalism, it’s just the opposite.”

The national network television news media in general acknowledged that the protest was grass roots, in nature. This aspect was driven home repeatedly by the Republican Party leadership and the Fox television news personalities, two entities often in political lockstep, prior to and after the event.  House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), called the event “Astroturf” because of the overt push it received from fat cat donors and Fox network talking heads.

While the President participated in a gathering of Western Hemisphere political leaders on the island of Trinidad, the release of the DOJ “torture memos” started a firestorm that, I believe, has the potential to sprout a genuine grass roots movement. Obama’s progressive supporters on the Democratic side of the aisle, or his own political family, are aggressively circulating a petition on the internet calling for the prosecution of all those governmental agents in the previous administration who participated in the policy that created the alleged tortuous acts.  The petition’s import is in direct opposition to Obama and the Attorney General’s promise not to prosecute any CIA operatives that may have direct involvement in carrying out these acts, as described in graphic detail in the previously classified DOJ documents.  Obama and Eric Holder have promised those CIA participants taxpayer supported legal defense, because the perpetrators were acting on advice from the DOJ, or, just carrying out orders from higher-ups.  The Nuremburg trials, immediately following WWII, featured prosecutions of Nazi’s, “Just following orders.”

One of the most compelling aspects of Obama’s campaign was his representation that among the “change” he would bring about was his vow to restore America’s moral authority in such matters. As he positioned himself against unjust prosecution of a misguided war, he promised transparency in his leadership in direct contradiction to Hillary and later McCain.  On Wednesday night, progressive stalwart, Keith Olberman of MSNBC, vehemently editorialized on Obama’s decision in this area and unequivocally stated, “Mr. President, you are wrong!”  Ooops!  Up jumped the first “family feud” in the Obama bunkhouse.  Among the graying and balding heads of Obama progressives are veterans of “real grass movement” protests from the 60’s.  Millions of these folks were on the front lines on behalf of civil rights and anti-war (Vietnam) conflagrations that occurred throughout the Republic with intensity and, on many occasions, with ferocity.  It is important to remember that Obama was born in 1961, therefore his memory of these cataclysmic struggles are not indelibly etched in his memory tapes.

At the present moment, Obama has opened a significant rift with conservatives that are outraged at his approved revelation of the previously top secret classified memos, and the bedrock of his political support, by saying he was turning a blind eye toward the perpetrators of these deeds.  Deeds, which are specifically prohibited by international treaties, of which our country is signator.  The president’s position is on a collision course.  The potential problems of this controversy are not inherited like the economic hand of cards he walked into upon his election.  Obama has chosen this present course entirely of his own volition.

In my judgment, President Obama is about to get a “real education” in presidential decision making and “grass roots movements.”

Joseph Marohl

Yesterday the Obama administration released a number of “secret documents” from the Bush years. These documents gave the President of the United States dictatorial powers in the war on terrorism. Since the “war on terrorism” cannot be defined as an actual war, Bush gave the Presidency powers undreamed of by Roosevelt and Lincoln—even Nixon—all of whom inflated Presidential powers beyond the limits set by the U.S. Constitution.

According to the Bush memos, the executive branch has the power to cancel Americans’ “unalienable” rights to protection from warrantless search and seizure and to free speech and a free press. Moreover, 92 videos of CIA interrogations have been destroyed—severely diminishing the chances of officially settling whether or to what extent the United States has engaged in torture.

In one memo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Woo states, “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

Current Attorney General Eric Holder spoke before the release of the documents, saying, “Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties.”

Although I am pleased that such memos are now matters of public record, what they reveal is no new news—we all knew this stuff—the Internet has been buzzing with it for years. The practices were so widespread—and flagrant—that the Bush administration’s connivance against American democracy and liberty was hardly a “secret.”

More disturbingly, we knew this, and the majority of us did not care. On many occasions, students in my argumentative writing classes expressed their willingness, even eagerness, to set aside their rights for (the illusion of) safety and security from terrorists—who, over the years, lost any existential reality and became more mythic—bogeymen to scare us with, instead of the very real Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts, who were untouched by these unprecedented powers and remain alive and active to this day.

Even before 2001, I had students who, in the middle of the Clinton years, complained that Americans have “too much freedom.” Sometimes, they were speaking against attempts to spread rights, protections, and privileges to under-represented minorities (i.e. gays and lesbians). Sometimes, they were speaking about moral and cultural laxness in general—easy divorce, sexy Calvin Klein ads, wife-swapping hillbillies duking it out with Jerry Springer—the same decadent values the Taliban cites as evidence against Western-style democracy. Sometimes, I suspect they were speaking about the growing visibility and self-assertion of non-white Americans—hinting at, but never forthrightly naming “the fear of a black planet.”

In response, I would quote Noam Chomsky—who said that freedom of speech for only ideas and opinions one approves of is no freedom of speech at all, that for freedom of speech to mean anything it must apply precisely to speech that offends, appalls, disturbs, and frightens us.

I would also caution—along lines I had been taught in my evangelical and military-based childhood—that it is easy to give up rights: all you have to do is shrug your shoulders and not care. But to gain rights once lost requires struggle, sacrifice, perhaps bloodshed.

Whatever I said, it didn’t work. My powers of argument and reason, such as they were, were inadequate to the task. I was swimming against the current, spitting into the zeitgeist, which clearly was moving towards authoritarianism—more specifically theocratic totalitarianism—a Nobodaddy in Chief who could provide the nation with free, unfunded infrastructure and security against anthrax and dirty bombs, so long as people just pipe down, toe the line, keep their knees together, and zip it up.

And I, no less a part of the problem, despaired. I wrote too few letters to Congress—and sometimes, when I did, I simply signed somebody else’s petition or plopped a twenty-dollar check in the mail to lobbyists and political candidates who were, I assumed without actually believing it, looking after my interests for me.

The founding fathers were, for the most part, landed gentry with a dream of liberty and democracy that the actual nation has been slow to grow into. To some extent this dream has been stunted by the decline of the agrarian, secularly enlightened, and romantic worldview that spawned it.

The Declaration of Independence coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations. Industrialization separated family members, pitted worker against worker, replaced natural cycles with clocks and flow charts, and robbed regular citizens of the time to research and debate current issues in order to make informed, individual decisions that affect their interests and values. Consumerism and hypnotizing mass entertainments have robbed ordinary men and women of the desire to understand, much less seek, the common good and their children of the education, objectivity, and attention span to enact the common good with humane, reasonable laws.

All is not lost, though. The effects of capitalism and advanced technological work have not all been negative. There are pockets of resistance and common sense. There are new tools and resources, undreamed of by the first Americans. If not a majority, a substantial minority of American and world citizens are not seeking a friendly tyrant or a compassionate conservative or a high priest or even a new federal Mom and Dad. Even if Obama himself proves incapable or unwilling to effect the kinds of changes the nation needs on the governmental level, people still have the power to imagine, proclaim, protest, subvert, and rally together for mutual interests.

Our biggest enemy is not a government intent on advancing its own empowerment at the cost of its citizens’ rights and liberties, but a citizenship too despairing or too self-absorbed or too cynical or too distracted or too hotheaded to affirm and advance the cause (and dream) of unalienable rights and liberty.

***

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/02/obama-releases-secret-bus_n_171171.html

Allison Bricker

On New Year’s Eve, while Kelly was at work, our youngest son and myself, spent the evening  in his bedroom building the Lego Star Wars ship he received from his Grandparents as a Christmas gift. Our youngest, being the complete Chicago Bears fan that he is, had his little alarm clock radio tuned to 780 AM WBBM, which is the station that broadcasts all the games, etcetera.

During a commercial break, we heard a help wanted advertisement from the CIA, attempting to recruit Americans to apply for a position in “The National Clandestine Service”.  The commercial contains buzz words like “patriotism”, “adventure”, “ambiguity”, and reeks of a Federal Government out of control.

A few question immediately sprang to my mind after hearing the CIA recruitment bulletin. Does a free nation really need a national snoop patrol? Is this in any way connected to President-Elect Obama’s previous remarks at a “Civilian National Security Force”? And what has become of our Republic? Fellow readers our country is indeed changing. As we sit mapping out sushi restaurants on our iPhones, the sacrifice of the Founding Generation is being wholly disposed of carte blanche in favor of “protecting the Homeland” and other ludicrous fear mongering one-liners.

Then again, it is obvious that the government’s definition of patriotism or perhaps more appropriately, neo-patriotism differs starkly from mine. Living under a constant surveillance apparatus coupled along with neighborhood snitches and the NSA’s “Black Widow” FISA approved, random email/phone-call eavesdropping computer program is the furthest thing from patriotic. Quite frankly, you do not defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic by side-stepping its enshrined restrictions against government abuse.

However, many may recall that shortly after September 11th, then Secretary of Defense and torture advocate, Donald Rumsfeld, along with his trigger-happy associate, Paul Wolfowitz pushing the idea of hot line for citizens to report “suspicious activities”.

“counter-surveillance of U.S. civilians is a perfectly understandable thing. In short,it’s no big deal.”
Donald Rumsfeld National Press Club Speech 2006

Source(s):