Millions of Americans are delusional to the extreme,

We certainly were deluded into war in Iraq and now a million are dead. Still the Deluder in Chief is in office instead of prison .

Blueflame
the deluder is there because of the consummate consumers and not because of the conscious citizens. Thanks.

""Ours lungs burn like the last remaining rainforests, our livers are damaged like the flagging filtration system of the shrinking wetlands, Our brains are showing signs of a vast diminishment of bio-diversity, our tongues now ceaselessly babble the intoxicated nonsense of the mass media. We start senseless brawls with other mindless, hostile, barstool tyrants, we're shunned by the world for our selfishness and recklessness acts -- but things are FINE -- We're in CONTROL -- Let's open another million barrels of oil, hair of the dogs of wars, and belly up to the bar, boys -- It doesn't get any better than this (the dismal reality of that sentiment alone should be enough to keep you drinking) -- Bartender -- another round for all my friends and all of the loyal and hardy members of the coalition of the swilling, come-on, bartender -- Don't ever think of taking away the keys to my Humvee -- We'll provide free rides on public transportation to secret detention camps for party-popping killjoys who think like that -- Come on, drink up everybody -- This round is on the future.... Hey, who turned out the lights?"

The breakdown of the power grid may augur what is in store for us. Like a chronic drunk with whom the collapse of vital region of his brain and nervous system are preceded by delirium tremors -- the blackout (another word culled from the lexicon of drunkards) is a dire warning. Unfortunately, as with the case of far-gone drunks, the means of apprehending the problem are already greatly diminished by the time the acute neurological symptoms are manifested. In short, they no longer possess enough of a brain to comprehend that their brain is dying. I fear culturally we are in the same predicament. The very things that provide us with the provisional comforts on which we've come to rely are the very things that are killing us. Without those things (like the prospect of facing the day without booze is for a hopeless alcoholic) -- life seems unbearable -- but with their escalating usage -- we seal our doom.

Selfishness, grandiosity, isolation, memory loss, a reckless disregard for the consequences of your actions upon others, the inability to trace the pervasive chaos of your life back to yourself: -- Confessions at an Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting -- or a description of the United States of America and her citizens in the present era?

Baudelaire advised (paraphrasing here): If you want to get drunk, stay drunk -- on wine, on poetry, or virtue. But what would have Baudelaire made of a culture that is drunk on oil (as opposed to freedom of movement), careerism (as opposite to devotion to craft), bad television (as opposed to losing ourselves in the sublime of a story well told), pornography (as opposed to revelry in the erotic), junk food (as opposed to Epicurean delight)? The list could go on and on... We, like a sloppy drunk, debase what we claim to delight in.

William Blake famously claimed: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Why then has it led us to the mcmansion, the drive-through windows of fast food restaurants, internet porn sites, massive shopping malls and endlessly replicating Mega-stores -- all of our proliferate palaces of soullessness located in this kingdom of the crass and the oblivious?

While there is excess in nature, there exists great thrift as well: The baroque of high summer is abstracted down to winter's minimalism.

Excess and Thrift. Nowadays, we do not recognize nor respect the dominion and necessary interplay of either. The ancients realized this attitude spelled trouble. The gods get testy when they are ignored. Physicists have a term for the wrath of vengeful gods -- it's called entropy. As Yeats prophesied: The center cannot hold.

Proliferating bacteria suffocate in their own waste in a petri dish. Traffic gridlocks. Communities disintegrate. The over-extended armies of empires bog down in distant wars. Power grids collapse.

But we seem to be blind to the warning signs of approaching tragedy. We seek provisional comforts to push down our growing sense of unease. Empty sensation replaces experience. Ruthlessness prevails over reason. Ambition over merit. Expediency over wisdom. A dim, callow prince usurps the throne. The world wends towards wasteland. Do you wonder why corporate food has so little taste -- but why, incongruously, you crave more of it? Why it is that pop music is so tedious and banal -- but it is so loud and ubiquitous? Why television is rarely enjoyable -- but we continue to watch it? It is due to the fact that we're not watching "Survivor" -- we're watching the "Entropy Hour." We're not watching "reality TV" -- we're watching the seething contents of a petri-dish's ever-accelerating spiral toward self-destruction. Like hopeless drunks, we are no longer the captains of our fate -- instead, we have given ourselves over to the engines of oblivion.

"Oh go piss up a rope, you tight-ass loser. Who the hell needs you at this party, anyway? I don't need your lectures -- I need comforting. I need to be told everything is going to be OK. That these things are going to work themselves out all on their own. That obviousness is salvation. That I'm being watched over by angels, just like Oprah and George W. Bush tell me. Swaddle me in a celestial missile defense shield of ignorant bliss. Ply me with more oil and tell me I'm the greatest. George W. Bush tells me the less I know the more smarter I am -- and the more smarter I am -- the less I want to know. See how things all work out without any effort on my part? That's the kind of smarts you can't get from books. So don't you go and try to tell me that things are going all to hell -- and that -- my drinking is making things worse -- That it might even be the cause of the mess I'm in -- I don't want to hear anything like that -- because that only has the effect of scaring me badly enough that I need another drink, god damn it! In fact, big mouth, you should be buying the next round -- You're either with us or against us!"

So goes the circular thought of addiction, which, like any other form of totalitarianism provides the promise of comfort, a sense of security, connection to a large order -- and demands, in return, indenturement, dependence, and obedience. When attempting to break the dependency by attempting to move more freely in the world, the addicted/totalitarian personality will freeze up -- like John Ashcroft before a pair of (even sculpted marble) breasts -- or like his dry drunk boss, George W. Bush (drunk on power -- if not the scent of his own rectal vapors) does when confronted with an unexpected question or occurrence. (On the morning of September 11, when informed that a second jet had struck the second tower of the World Trade Center, W. continued reading aloud from "The Hungry Caterpillar" to an audience of school children at a staged and highly scripted event.) To an addict or drunk (dry or otherwise) there is far too much uncertainty involved in a spontaneous act, too much danger of exposure, too much risk that their tiny, insular reality that they have constructed out of expediency and casuistry might be shattered by exposure to the vast, unpredictable world. George W. Bush suffers from such a high degree of pathological rigidity -- he could easily be replaced by an animatronic figure from Disneyland's Hall of Presidents and few would notice. It's a small world after all. Or: -- At least the Corporate Capitalist/Neo-Con Fantasist/Christian Fundamentalist version of it is.

Benumbed by it all, we need more and more distraction and hype to get us off. We have developed such a high tolerance for fakery and phoniness that we don't react with outrage when we witness the empty spectacle of a spoiled preppy frat-boy, who went AWOL rather than serve in the military, costumed in jet-fighter jump suit and useing billion dollar military hardware as a prop for purposes of partisan propaganda. Nor does it register when we are confronted with pictures of dead and maimed Iraqi men, woman, and children whose fate was sealed by those same soulless machines of war.

"Sure, I've had a blackout or two. OK, OK -- I did wake-up one morning to realize that I had been rolled by Enron executives -- but I swear -- I don't know when during the spree I spent the budget surplus and then went into deficit bingeing -- but here's the bill -- It's right here on my Master Card (make that my Mastah Card -- just like on a plantation). What this now? -- You're telling me I got really belligerent and started a war? Well, I must have had a really good reason. The guy must have taken a swing at me first.... No, you say.... I broke into his home in the middle of the night and started pummeling him. Well, I bet he was planning something. I bet he had weapons hidden there and he was ready to use them against me.... They found no weapons. I bet he wanted some weapons, though. I bet he wanted to use them on me. He hated me because he's jealous of me -- They're all jealous of us Americans -- and you know why -- it's because we're free to do and say whatever we please -- and if you disagree with that -- I'll kick your ass too."

So goes the palaver from the petri dish here in the United States of Entropy.

http://www.swans.com/library/art9/procks08.html

The consumers of the United States must be allowed to sit, in perpetuity, high above the roadways of the land, serene within their over-sized pick-up trucks and SUVs, their junk food-bloated countenances must never be darkened by want, doubt, nor self-reproach.

So we are told we must soldier on. Withdrawal from Iraq is not an option. Take note: Never has an empire risen and flourished beneath the sun whose soil has not been composted with corpses.

Hence, this is not the time for fretting. We must go into the breach. The gaping maw of empire must be fed...the belly of the beast rumbles. It would ill-behoove such a powerful and awe-inspiring beast to gravel for its meals...it needs oil to thrive and it need not proffer an apology to anyone. For what sort of predator has the need to ask for dispensation to sate its god-given appetite?

That was the post-Vietnam era mistake -- all the pathetic naval gazing and enervating self-doubt. Richard Nixon knew the truth: People respect ruthlessness; they loathe equivocation -- it makes them damn nervous. But the nattering ninnies won that round and brought Nixon down.

And for their anti-American sins of self-doubt they received Jimmy Carter, who delivered cardigan-draped bromides of thrift and Sunday school sermons of self-restraint and personal sacrifice...and that sort of thing drove people to cocaine and disco.

And the high cost and banality of (not to mention brain-damage incurred by) those activities left the nation susceptible to the platitudes of easy prosperity and the shallow, confident man assurances of power and prosperity without sacrifice promised by Ronald Reagan.

All the while, through the nineteen-eighties, George W. Bush hid himself among mountains of the afore-mentioned Bolivian powder and Arnold Schwarzenegger brandished fists full of anabolic steroids and created for himself a body that is a precise metaphor for his adopted land, a nation that worships the appearance of strength -- but whose interior life is as stunted as that of a narcissist bodybuilder, a preening twit for whom the larger world serves no greater purpose than for the adoration of his over-sized, oil-lacquered muscles.

More and more, the American mind began to suffer from steroid-induced psychosis. Our self-absorption was only surpassed by our paranoia. The proxy armies of the Evil Empire awaited the command from their Kremlin masters to attack and enslave us. Homosexuals plotted to destroy the American family -- thereby leaving aimless children adrift and easy prey for conversion by skulking sodomites. Civil liberty advocates employed legalistic weasel words to hamstring the police and thwart the legal system giving criminals carte blanche to roam the streets and commit crimes with impunity, while their Welfare Queen mothers cushioned their posh asses on the leather seats of Cadillacs and cruised the city streets trading Food Stamps for crack cocaine.

Then it grew far, far worse. Then came a threat to everything we hold sacred in Christendom: Bill Clinton.

But godly souls need not have worried -- he turned out to be simply a Sybaritic salesman of global neo-liberal colonialism. The sinner increased the flock of the saved. For once you have them strung out on the lust for consumer goods, lottery tickets, and the like, then they'll grow hollow, anxious, and desperate enough to believe that religious fundamentalism will be a balm that will sooth the ache of emptiness attendant to trading one's humanity for the caged life of an economic animal. The more limited the scope of one's life, the easier the notion of Hell is to envisage. When one's life offers no greater purpose than mindless labor and joyless appetites -- the greater the need for release -- the greater the desperation to believe in the boundless freedom of Heaven.

Plus, Bill Clinton even did Ronald Reagan one better: He bitch-slapped those Welfare Queens so hard their taxpayer-subsidized gold teeth rattled. Across the land, good Christians paused to listen to the satisfying thwap.

The poor must be taught that God, seated upon his golden throne, scorns the sight of their wanton and indolent ways.

The era of George W. Bush has brought a new revelation: If the rich had even more money -- then the Baby Jesus would smile.

The Kingdom of the Lord stands before us. If we listen closely, we can hear the voice of God as he counts his money. Our enemies plot to deprive us of his riches -- that is why they strive to kill us as we attempt to retrieve the oil wealth he left for us, and us alone, beneath their lands.

So top-off your gas tanks, good citizen-soldiers of the Lord -- it is your duty to your God and Country. Those are not traffic jams on the freeways of the United States of America -- but the marching formations of God's Holy Army rolling towards the final battle with forces of darkness. That is not smog draping the horizon before your windshield -- but the hems of the celestial robes of angels. Like the fumes discharged from your exhaust pipe, you too will rise in the Rapture.

Drive, the Lord said unto his armies. The earth will tremble beneath your righteous radials. The road ahead leads to victory in Iraq -- if not blessed Armageddon. Do not pause. Do not tarry. Doubters will be but roadkill on God's highway.

The EndTime battle is at hand. You are being tested. This is how you can hasten the Second Coming: You must not waver from living beyond your means -- as well as the means of the planet to sustain you.

You must fall into the ranks of The Consumer's Crusade. Do not mourn the casualties of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the holy conflagrations yet to come -- continue to fill-up your gas-guzzlers in their hallowed name.

http://www.swans.com/library/art10/procks35.html

he misunderstanding by many Americans of certain word definitions is shameful because that misunderstanding is promoted by those who have much to gain while We, the People, lose. Modern hype, or slang for hypodermic, is meant "to stimulate, excite, enliven artificially etc. by or as by the injection of a narcotic drug." according to my old copy of Webster's New World Dictionary, 1970, p. 690. The journalists and their employers, the corporations, have been practicing this "art" of hype since, at least, Richard Nixon was president. The purpose is to change the United States into a stupefied client state of consumers rather than allowing citizens more standing than a mere business.

That being said, we will leave 1970-2007 and go back to 1880 and the Library of Universal Knowledge for definitions of some currently battered terms. My husband and I watched Michael Moore's movie Sicko this weekend. To our surprise, the medical programs in Canada, France, and Great Britain were totally free and totally democratic. So, what happened here in the United States? The word "socialism" reared its head. This word is so misunderstood and misused in this country that an alien from outer space would think we had no reference material and no time to look into what is printed daily in the newspapers (or not, as the case usually may be!)

Volume XIII, page 608, defines socialism as,
the name given to a class of opinions opposed by the present organization of society, and which seeks to introduce a new distribution of property and labor, in which organized co-operation rather than competition should be the dominating principle, under the conviction that the happiness of the race, and especially of the classes without capital, would be benefited thereby.

Historically considered, socialism, like many of the significant phenomena of our age, is a product of the French revolution. That terrible outburst of popular discontent is most properly regarded as an anarchic attack on the social system that had its roots in the feudalism of the middle ages. The furious hatred of the court and the aristocracy, the passionate love of the "people," of "humanity," of "liberty," though called forth by special circumstances, and never formally worked out into a theory of social life, virtually contained within themselves the germs of all later proposed organizations.

In the middle ages, the right of freely and fully enjoying life, property, and political independence was limited to a favored few, while the great masses were condemned to dumb servitude, and a perpetual minority. Even the industrial population did not recognize the socialistic idea. The members of the different guilds and fraternities claimed exclusive right to exercise certain branches of industry, and probably the great majority of the inhabitants of a town remained in a disregarded and dependent state.

Amid such social conditions, resting, as they did, on a belief in the necessity of different distinct ranks, the free action of individual life, and even the vital progress of the whole community, became well-nigh impossible. We have not the space here to trace the course of the various minor reforms that weakened the medieval theory of life; but we must not omit to notice the speculations of the political philosophers in the 18th c. (century) in France, England, and Germany, as operating powerfully in favor of the new social system, in which the idea of humanity (assuming, at the French revolution, as we have observed, the concrete form of the "people") stands out prominently.

Nevertheless, the first shape that the modern spirit of industry took was not socialistic, in the strict and proper sense of the term; it was rather individualistic, and found, as it still finds -- for it is yet the prevailing theory -- its natural expression in such proverbs as, "A fair field, and no favor;" "Everyone for himself, and God for us all." But still, even this lawless individualism is to be regarded as a protest against the false class-legislation of preceding times, and as an assertion of the absolute right of each member of society to a share in the general welfare (emphasis added).

That it has not universally recommended itself to civilized mankind as a perfect system, is demonstrated by the appearance and temporary popularity of such schemes ... and the enthusiasm excited at intervals in different parts of Europe by the promulgation of extreme communistic opinions.

It is objected to socialism, under its various forms, that it makes human happiness too much dependent on material gratifications; that it robs man of that energy that springs from ambition; that it unphilosophically ignores an individualism and inequality that nature herself has given her inviolable sanction; and that, by the abolition of social rewards and punishments, it neither holds out any hope to the industrious, nor excites any apprehension among the indolent.

On the other hand, we must admit that the vigourous assertion of socialistic principles has led men to a more liberal and generous view of humanity as a whole. Moreover, it has forcibly called public attention to numerous evils that have sprung up along with the modern development of industry, for which no remedy-not even a name-had been provided; to the vital interdependence of all classes; and to the inadequacy of the individual or "selfish" system, as it has been called, to redress the wrongs or cure the evils that inevitably spring from its own unchecked operation.

The recent spread of socialistic opinions in Germany, taken in connection with the two attempts made on the life of the emperor, has led, in 1878, to special and stringent legislation designed to check the growth of socialism.

Perhaps, as a People, we have forgotten to read the beginning of the United States Constitution, that is, the Preamble to it. In the preceding quote, I emphasized the term "general welfare" for a reason. This is the Preamble to our very own Constitution and should be the guiding principles to our behavior towards each other legally, judicially, politically, and actually.
We, the People of the United States, in order to:

* form a more perfect union,

* establish justice,

* insure domestic tranquility,

* provide for the common defence,

* promote the general welfare, and

* secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and

* (secure the blessing of liberty) to our posterity,

do ordain and establish the Constitution of the United States of America.

Note that our very 230-year-old Constitution has the socialistic phrase: general welfare as one of our purposes as a People. That being said, the remarkable disdain for that general welfare in the form of universal healthcare for American citizens is put down as "socialism." Socialism is not a bugaboo; it is fairness to all. Our Founding Fathers sincerely knew this and set their lives and sacred honor to the above cause.

Other countries have healthier citizens with longer life spans than Americans do. We rank 37th from the top. The general welfare is necessary unless the planet is about to be decimated by the people worried they will be held to account for their depredations amongst our young, our sick, our old, our citizens dying needlessly for want of care they could get in Canada or Europe if we weren't so afraid of the boogeyman of socialism in the guise of universal health care for Americans.

In 1890, when a mere clerk elevated corporations to persons, We, the People, lost our place to the "new boss, just like the old boss" (the aristocracy of the Middle Ages). These new "business elites" have harmed us in several very special ways as elites are wont to do. For example, they have bought and sold most of our elected congresspersons to do their bidding with tons of money scammed from us by bogus laws.

What do we do? Go to court? Write our Congress? That may or may not work since the Executive Branch and the Congress have packed the court with their own. The Executive Branch is now a dynasty rather than a presidency. Its attendant bureaus no longer serve the People with scientists and well-rounded public servants, which was the case many years ago.

This Branch is being privatized and outsourced and replaced with political operatives. The Executive has run up the public debt to outrageous sums while our dollar is worth about $0.045 (that's cents). Our military uses sixty percent of the oil and trillions of our hard-earned dollars. Meanwhile, our health care is meted out in tiny amounts to those who have pure and clean medical histories without costs to the corporations, thanks to collusion between Richard Nixon and the HMOs.

Citizens are sick and dying but the establishment puts them out on the street in their hospital gowns. Our wounded veterans are being held in backroom barracks without immediately appropriate medical care. The Veterans Administration is part of the Executive Branch. Birth defects in the soldiers' children? Ignore it. Hide the deaths; hide the children; hide Iraq from us. Send our tax dollars to the weapons manufacturers for their welfare, not ours.

Jobs are going everywhere but here. The business people have replaced the earls, dukes, counts, princes, etc. of old under the feudal systems of the past. An unelected president from the new feudal dynasties of the world sits in Washington and spends lives and money, limbs and depleted uranium, as if it were a precious metal instead of a junk problem for the nuclear industry.

We send money to China to make items that will kill our children with lead poisoning, among other pollutants coming to us by sea and by air. Our consumer-oriented idiocy has produced hell on earth and the planet is in its grip. We act as a plague upon the planet. We swarm and harm and kill and maim, but here in our nest, we pretend we are civilized to the end. Do any of you remember the three monkeys? My parents had a set: see no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil. In other words, hide the truth from yourself, citizen monkey.

We haven't had news about the truth of anything since 9/11 or, maybe, 1980. It is all hype, the drug of corporate choices. We pretend we are the country but we have been supplanted by the bogus "persons" who poison our food, our medicines, our government, our air, our lives, and who no longer care to report anything. We are living in an insane asylum; but, it is so comfortable, isn't it? Thinking and acting sanely hurts; buying is more fun; it gives everyone something to show for the effort.

Even good conversation is disappearing as electronic devices supplant humanity's need for contact. Socialism isn't the problem; conditioning is. When death comes here as it must everywhere, will you realize that capitalism is worse than the general welfare for the uncaring few? Will it be too late?

What about our grandchildren? The native peoples worry about actions seven generations into the future. Do we? Nope, not even close to the next fiscal year. Will they live off dumps in their future since we never cared about them and still don't?

The Constitution is dead. We lost our rights this year, all of them. There is no hue and cry for restoration except my letters to Congress. I had to send them. My ancestors fought and wrote the Preamble. Soon the military will be taking over when we've had enough and rise up as the French did, provided we are healthy. If not, another bogus and inhuman empire will grace our shores for a short time. Am I angry? Yes. Are you?

I will close with a quote from Media Lens, November 13, 2007:
Even to have this discussion, even to talk about the problem of corporate control, is to be "untrustworthy," to be judged beyond the pale. As ever, the rationalization revolves round the idea that it is somehow impolite, disrespectful, unreasonable, and even disgraceful to bring to light what is "simply understood" and cannot be challenged. The "gentleman's agreements" that so often lie at the heart of modern systems of thought control are really deemed to be just that -- to challenge them is to be deemed something less than a "gentleman."

It is imprudent, indeed, for any of us to "shut up" when so much modern suffering is built precisely on silence.

And, I must add, all this silence is a serious misunderstanding of the general welfare, socialism, and the Constitution of the United States of America.
http://www.swans.com/library/art13/carenc22.html

"As long as we maintain our delusions, our purposeful ignorance, our disastrous belief in fictions and fables, the reality of man killing man will endure, long into perpetuity, possessing our nature and our condition, concocting war after war, molding violence and destruction through the deadly mixture of our instincts, behaviors and mammalian predispositions. Until we finally decide to purge the grip of our self-deception, of thinking ourselves beyond the realm of our reality and truth, of who and what we really are, and not what we pretend to be, humankind will linger on in the limbo of self-destruction, living a fantasy that does not comport with our reality, granting ourselves small windows of temporary sanity, inevitably blown to bits by the destructive qualities we chose to ignore and not confront."
--Manuel Valenzuela--------

Delusion destroys democracy
By Joel S. Hirschhorn



Will Americans learn to trust their fellow citizens or stay stuck on stupidly backing serial political betrayers?


Also clear to some of us is that the delusional Bush has survived because delusion runs rampant across the nation, blocking populist actions in the national interest. Below are the main states of American delusion.

Millions of Americans persist in believing, contrary to all historical evidence, that changing control of Congress and the Executive Branch between Democrats and Republicans produces sorely needed reforms. But mainstream politicians are serial betrayers. Thus, people suffer from delusional political faith.

Millions of non-wealthy Americans believe that the economy works for them. This persists despite reams of facts that show how working- and middle-class people are not receiving their fair share of national income and wealth. They keep running on a debt treadmill that will not take them to the proverbial American dream. What they get is economic insecurity, inequality and injustice. Consumer confidence is an oxymoron. This is delusional prosperity.

Viral delusional thinking is that America sets the gold standard for democracies. The rest of the world, however, to its credit sees an arrogant nation with a government that uses its military strength foolishly and sees its policies rewarding the rich at the expense of all others. People from Finland to New Zealand question why Americans do not receive universal health care, why its workers are sacrificed for global trade and corporate powers, why millions of its citizens go hungry and homeless, why so few people bother to vote, why so many politicians are convicted of crimes, and why there are more people in prisons than in all other countries combined. Yet Americans, by and large, keep thinking that their constitutional republic gives them first class democracy. This is delusional patriotism.

So, what are we to do? Keep expressing dissent by marching and protesting in the streets? Keep signing petitions on the Internet? Keep demanding impeachment of Bush? Keep reading and writing angry diatribes on progressive websites? Keep voting for mainstream politicians from the two major parties, hoping for a political messiah? Keep obeying Bush by borrowing, spending, shopping and consuming to keep our debt-ridden nation afloat?


he real needs are structural reforms that combat the major societal delusions that are driving America downhill. We must attack the root causes of problems rather than provide temporary relief or cover-up of symptoms.

Delusional political faith and delusional prosperity require profound reforms in our political system. A new competitive political party is needed. One that is guided by a set of principles that both mainstream Democrats and Republicans cannot opportunistically accept, because the principles clearly conflict with their rotten behavior. A recent New America Foundation survey of Californians found that "seven in 10 voters say they often feel they must choose the lesser of two evils; more than half the voters say California needs another major political party."

Delusional patriotism is tougher to remedy. To revitalize American democracy we must have a national dialogue. Heed the words of the great John Marshall: "The people made the constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their will, and lives only by their will." And James Madison: "the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their Government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution." Thomas Jefferson believed that the constitution-drafting process should be repeated by each generation of Americans. That's what real freedom is all about. A great democracy must be much more than stable -- it must be self-correcting.


http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1730.shtml

"People from Finland to New Zealand question why Americans do not receive universal health care, why its workers are sacrificed for global trade and corporate powers, why millions of its citizens go hungry and homeless, why so few people bother to vote, why so many politicians are convicted of crimes, and why there are more people in prisons than in all other countries combined. Yet Americans, by and large, keep thinking that their constitutional republic gives them first class democracy. This is delusional patriotism."

The creeds and noble ideals of the nation become empty cliches, used to justify acts of greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the end, there is only a raw lust for power and few willing to confront it.

The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.

Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.

An increasing number of voices, especially within the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.

"There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders," retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have been "derelict in their duties" and guilty of a "lust for power."

The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers' rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country's managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.

Philadelphia is a textbook example. The city has seen a precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs, jobs that allowed households to live comfortably on one salary. The city had 35 percent of its workforce employed in the manufacturing sector in 1950, perhaps the zenith of the American empire. Thirty years later, this had fallen to 20 percent. Today it is 8.8 percent. Commensurate jobs, jobs that offer benefits, health care and most important enough money to provide hope for the future, no longer exist. The former manufacturing centers from Flint, Mich., to Youngstown, Ohio, are open sores, testaments to a growing internal collapse.

The United States has gone from being the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. As of September 2006, the country was, for the first time in a century, paying out more than it received in investments. Trillions of dollars go into defense while the nation's infrastructure, from levees in New Orleans to highway bridges in Minnesota, collapses. We spend almost as much on military power as the rest of the world combined, while Social Security and Medicare entitlements are jeopardized because of huge deficits. Money is available for war, but not for the simple necessities of daily life.

Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.

The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.

It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071126_america_in_the_time_of_empire/

entropy.

Are we really expected to read such long initial postings for this thread? I believe a more concise initial posting reaches more viewers.

Seriously. Do you have any ideas of your own?

This is boring.

To much truth for you guys? "The creeds and noble ideals of the nation become empty cliches, used to justify acts of greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the end, there is only a raw lust for power and few willing to confront it."

Um, truth should not be confused with copying and pasting.

This must be the part of the playground where the disenfranchised, cast out, lonely kids hang out. I've never been here before. It's ugly, and I'm leaving.

To find a befitting article to upholcd one's critical view is an arduous task.
Because one has to think deeply before highlighing the point in a picturesque
language.

To select a topic one has to read a lot which is also not an easy job.
Thanks

Yeah, it's better to hang out in the woods in Michigan, where instead of answering to reality, you have only to face furry animals, with a resounding crack of your rifle.

You guys are what's boring. Why come here if you cant handle the truth in the articles posted. They're informative and well worth discussing. But rather than address the substance you whine about their very posting. If you did discuss the substance I'm sure you'd be answered intelligently which is the point of cutting and pasting in the first place. "Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news." That's a paragraph worth discussing. Agree with it or disagree with it it presents food for thought besides being the an accurate analysis of America in 2007.