What, if we're honest with ourselves, are we to call a system of government that behaves in these ways:
* Taxes its ordinary people into unfathomable national debt, thereby ensuring that its rich revel in even more riches, its poor regress into even more poverty,
Our government does no ensure either that the rich get richer or the poor get poorer.
See
Message 19027812
Its not completly up to date but it covers the issue well.
The national debt it high, but its burden is lower then it has been at many times in our past and lower then it is in a number of other rich industrialized democracies. That doesn't mean it is a good thing but calling it unfathomable exaggerates it impact.
Devises and enforces policies that starve public services for its most vulnerable citizenry - its children, its elderly, its working poor, its racial minorities?
This is simply untrue. Every year, year after year social spending goes up.
Sells national and state legislation to the highest bidders from among wealthy interest groups, while vigorously resisting reforms that would restore democratic power to the individual?
There is some truth to this, even if it is exaggerated, but many of the proposed reforms are cures that are worse then the illness and might do little to help with the illness.
Exercises its contempt for the collective will of other nations by unilaterally tearing up global arms and environmental treaties, while dismissing both the legal and moral authority of the United Nations?
The ABM treaty was not violated, we obeyed the agreement to the letter. The Global warming treaty was never and would never be ratified by the US and was in no way binding on us. Many other countries also failed to ratify it. As for the legal and moral authority of the UN it has none of the first (it is not a world government) and little of the second.
Invades and conquers a sovereign country by fabricating military intelligence as a pretext for invasion, then, declares "liberation" as its real intention all along as it expropriates that nation's oil fields?
Taking Iraqi oil is not and was not the real intent and liberating Iraqis from under the heel of Saddam was not wrong. As for fabricating intelligence you haven't made your case that we have done so.
Turns one cataracted eye to atrocities in dozens of other countries that have no oil wells to liberate, the other to a report by Amnesty International critical of its own behavior as a "liberator"?
We can't impose freedom and democracy on the world. The US has its hands full with the projects it has already taken on. In any case Mr. Rozelle first criticizes us for being to eager to impose a solution by force and now for not being eager enough. I submit that he should choose one theme and stick with it.
In a work of egregious TV propaganda, lands its supreme leader "at sea" (costumed as a fighter pilot) on the state-of-the-art USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim victory over a third-rate, enfeebled nation?
Nothing wrong with an American president, our commander in chief, visiting the military on its way back from war.
Holds nameless prisoners incommunicado, without counsel or charges, for indefinite periods of time, in addition incarcerating the highest proportion of its own citizens (most of them black) in the world?
Prisoners captured in Afghanistan are not totally incommunicado. We are not keeping for example the red cross from seeing them. Prisoners captured during a war would normally be freed when there is peace, but there is no peace in the war on terrorism. Nor is it realistic to hold a trial for anyone who fights for the enemy. Can you imagine having to try every captured Nazi soldier in WWII?
As for the highest proportion of its own citizens being incarcerated that is not true. But the rate is very high and it probably is the highest among rich democracies. Its mostly due to our "war on drugs". Whether drugs should be illegal is another issue and discussing it now would take off on a distant tangent but I will say that I think that at least the more mild illegal drugs like marijuana and perhaps most or all of them, should be legal. As for "most of them black" that is also not true.
Actively attempts to nullify laws intended to ensure equality for racial and other minorities, at the same time invoking evangelical Christianity as the primary motive for all of its policies?
To more false statements.
Alone among Western nations preserves capital punishment, even seeking to try alleged murderers in states where, upon conviction, the likelihood of execution is most probable?
This is another example of something that would lead us of to a whole separate issue. I'll leave it alone except for saying there is nothing fascist about the death penalty.
Threatens the civil rights of individual citizens by expanding its surveillance and policing powers, including pressuring libraries to release to federal authorities the reading records of library patrons?
There is reason for concern here, but there is also reason for the government to be vigilant. I think there have been some bad decisions made in this area but calling it fascist is an extreme exaggeration.
Conspires to consolidate media control - and thereby dissemination of "news" information - among corporate leviathans lavishly invested in perpetuating the incumbent party's political power?
So now its a conspiracy? Possibly allowing companies to have less restrictions as to what media properties they can buy, whether or not it is a good idea, is not conspiring to consolidate media control, nor is it a plot by the administration or corporations that would seek to control the news and only show programs favorable to the administration. This smacks of some Oliver Stone movie rather then a sober analysis of the real world.
Fascism: "A philosophy of government that stresses the primacy and glory of the state ... obedience to its leader, subordination of the individual will to the state's authority ... suppression of dissent. Martial virtues are celebrated, while liberal democratic values are denigrated ... led by charismatic leaders who represented to their publics the strength that could rescue their nation from political and economic conditions."
Not a description of the United States at this time, or at any time in its history, even during Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus or the internment of Japanese Americans.
Tim |
