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Respect Americans and Transform America
By Frank Scott
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, November 15, 2010
We approach the annual celebration of peace, love and over consumption
as America's longest war threatens to become longer and spread to more
nations. But there will be less consuming than usual in a time of political
repression, economic recession and social depression. Class relations
are strained by the most unequal distribution of wealth in our history and
political divisions are causing canine-like political disputes among
confused citizens angrily chasing their own tails. We fight ourselves under
controlling force that prevents us from recognizing commonality by
stressing differences. Ethnicities, skin tones and identity groups are used
to keep us from confronting a disaster we face in common and even our minds
are hyphenated into divisions causing battles of self against self.
Some were near panic over Tea Party victories in the fiasco we call our
electoral democracy, insisting that fascism was at hand. Other equally
mystified voters crowed of triumph for the common man at having elected more
employees of the rich. Billion dollar campaigns mask the fact that
both capitalist parties keep switching crews on the Titanic as the ship
continues to sink. The cancer or polio choice offered the citizenry every
two years has more than fifty percent never bothering to vote and results in
minorities electing a government bought and paid for by infinitely smaller
minorities. No wonder there is growing if baffling disgust with
a politics dominated by corporate capital, billionaires and foreign
interests. Our anti-social politics create fear, anger
and ignorance and send them into battle against ignorance, anger and fear.
The minority voting for cancer shows contemptuous disrespect for the
minority voting for polio. And vice versa. This civil war threatens a
terminal social disease if it continues neglecting our political economy. A
manipulated struggle between those thinking they are more virtuous or more
patriotic makes respect for one another almost impossible and
prevents identifying the real problem: a minority dominated economic monster
spending trillions of public dollars on imperial war, bank bailouts
and private wealth. It is bankrupting the nation and may bring further
disaster if it is not democratically subdued. People
should be disgusted with government that serves minority interests and not
the mass of Americans who think themselves democrats, republicans,
independents or apathetics. A relatively tiny group representing
corporations and finance capital dominates our politics. This cabal controls
national wealth, which it uses to create staggering private profits from war
and waste, all at the expense of a public absorbing the crippling loss.
Calling this a democracy should make people furious but those using media to
manage our minds the way they use politics to manage the rest of our lives
propagandize us into lashing out at scapegoats.
The smug superiority shown by some liberals is negatively balanced by the
hateful bigotry shown by some conservatives. These divisions are the product
of a market culture that only profits some at the expense of others. But we
all pay a price when we focus on the results and not the source of our
problems. People from upscale communities who support immigration but whose
only contact with immigrants is when their houses are cleaned, their
children tended or their homes repaired are hardly more politically correct
than those who complain about immigration because they deal with its social
impact of crowded neighborhoods and lost jobs. Our anti-social environment
makes immigration beneficial to some and costly to others. But that’s true
of everything else in our profit and loss economy. And those believing
that America is failing not because government spends trillions on imperial
warfare and service to great wealth, but because it spends millions on the
most downtrodden in our society are not only misguided; they are loony.
This is feudal era politics setting peasants
against serfs while the landlord laughs all the way to the bank but it’s
more deadly in the 21st century. Divide and conquer thoughts that would have
taken years to put into people’s heads in ages past can corrupt minds more
quickly in technologically wired societies where transmitting propaganda
takes micro seconds. And when American political leaders mouth platitudes
about social justice and fighting racism while they invest taxpayer dollars
in propping up a racial theocracy in Israel, our problems are not tea party
members, Muslims or immigrants but a power structure that rules with such
murderous hypocrisy. The holiday season is as good
a time as any to begin acting on teachings of humanity and cooperation in
direct contradiction to the prevailing values of anti-social bigotry and
murderously competitive war making. We suffer under a system which is
inflicting austerity on the public while a minority gorges itself and
induces the people to blame one another for problems which originate not
with individuals but in the social organization itself. Food, clothing and
shelter are not rising in cost because poor people live in comfort but
because rich people lavish in luxury. The military budget does not
continually expand because we are threatened from outside the USA but
because inside the USA there are psychotics demanding wars on Iran and any
other nation or people that dare to attempt breaking the imperial model and
changing the organization of nations to support humanity before private
profit. And in order to deal with these and more problems that threaten our
survival as a people and not simply as an identity group among people, we
need to be human beings with common purpose. We could start by trying to
understand why there is disagreement and ignorance among us and not simply
demean others as secular idiots, religious morons, political terrorists or
imbeciles from outer space. It might help us create democratic solutions to
problems that threaten all of our futures. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah
and Bless Americans. At least try, for a change. Frank Scott
writes political commentary which appears in print in The Independent
Monitor and online at the blog Legalienate
email: frankscott@comcast.ne
http://legalienate.blogspot.com
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