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Billy Joel was on to something when he sang "Only the Good Die Young." Here in America, our government does not jail its dissidents; it launches programs like COINTELPRO to pursue them (with reckless disregard for the law), and to covertly engineer their assassinations. Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, the Kennedy brothers, and Malcolm X are but a few of "the Good" who dared to challenge the wealthy US ruling elite’s malevolent domination over the poor, minorities and working class. In the "land of the free", your right to dissent (and to live) ends when you begin posing a serious threat to those who truly wield the power.
As fate would have it, John Hinckley's bullet missed its mark, enabling a malignant scourge of humanity to continue his reign of sadism. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Central American civilians would still be alive were it not for Ronald Reagan. America's steady march back to the "good old days" of Social Darwinism would have been severely retarded. Disciples of Leo Strauss's Machiavellian philosophies would not infect our government as they do today. Yet Reagan survived, social injustice is once again the predominating force in domestic politics, and millions around the world suffer and die as the US government pursues global domination.
Apparently, a fair number of Americans agreed with Joel’s line that the "Sinners are much more fun..." Our government is still dominated by sadistic narcissists who shamelessly mask their avaricious, sanguineous agenda with noble words like freedom, democracy, and liberty. In the US, sociopaths like George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney dominate our government, enabling them to commit heinous crimes against humanity as they feed their obscene appetites for wealth and power. At worst, they caused 9/11. At best, they knew it was coming and allowed nearly 3,000 Americans to die so they could have the "Pearl Harbor" they desperately needed to justify the initiation of their coveted perpetual “war against terrorism". In toppling Saddam Hussein, a ruthless dictator whom it openly supported while he committed acts of genocide in the 1980's, the US government has murdered over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and 2,000 American service people. In New Orleans, it seized the opportunity of a natural disaster to practice its own version of ethnic cleansing. As they feed their precious military industrial complex while starving domestic programs which foster the well-being of average Americans, the blatant malefactors leading our nation are the enemies of humanity.
As I have sifted through the many emails and comments on my blog (Thomas Paine's Corner) from my more antagonistic readers over the last year, I have concluded that the power moguls in DC are reflections of a significant number of their constituency, despite the fact that the Bush regime resorted to cheating to win the last two presidential elections.
Why are there a significant number of Americans who support the morally reprehensible agenda of the Bush regime and its predecessors? One can point to an array of contributing factors such as insularity from the rest of the world, a bombardment of potent propaganda disseminated by the mainstream media, the hubris which naturally emerges from the unenlightened wielding great power, and a grossly inadequate public education system that "white" washes history. Yet regardless of the root causes, the Ugly American is alive and well. I have learned that the United States is not a particularly friendly environment for proponents of social justice, peace, intellectual freedom, and human rights. The consensus amongst decent human beings (those in the United States and in other nations) is that universal human rights and peaceful co-existence are moral imperatives, but in Pax Americana, many worship the virtual antithesis.
Utilizing snippets and quotes from a variety of correspondences I have received from readers, I have compiled a composite sketch of the narcissistic, selectively misanthropic Ugly Americans who dominate our government, and apparently comprise a fair percentage of our populace. May the Higher Power of each person’s understanding help us if they truly represent a majority. Fortunately, in spite of their arrogant belief to the contrary, it is highly unlikely that they do.
"You say you are anti-war. I say I am anti-death. The difference between you and the 50% of this country who support Bush is that you need to learn the hard way there just is no such thing as anti-war when thy enemies will stop at absolutely nothing to destroy you."
CBS News poll results released on 11-3-05 showed a 35% job approval rating for George Bush. The United States government, as an entity, is an enemy to the human race. If it ceased killing civilians (i.e. the 3 to 5 million in Vietnam), it would stop creating enemies. Besides, the United States has not been invaded since the War of 1812, and 9/11 was perpetrated with the endorsement and/or assistance of our own government. Anti-death? Our government specializes in the murder of innocents to achieve its goal of hegemony. As for the true enemy, it gazes back at many of our leaders and their sycophants each time they stare in the mirror.
"Most important, Jason: Your march was not covered because the vast majority of US knows that you are silly and insignificant. That your short sightedness will only become evident to you when a terrorist sets a bomb next to you because you are a white American and you believe in Jesus, not allah (They really don't care whether you do or not Jason)."
If marching on Washington DC in support of peace and social justice qualifies me as "silly and insignificant", sign me up for a life-time contract. I will leave war, murder, hate, torture and racism to the "serious and significant" of the world. Propaganda pitting Christianity against Islam as a "good versus evil" dichotomy has obviously achieved a measure of success in America. I wonder if the 100,000 "brown" Iraqis who believed in Allah realized their "short-sightedness" as the American military machine slaughtered them.
"We balance the sanctity of human life better than any country on earth. We are violent, true, but we have had to be. Ironically, the things that have happened to us are because of our stance on human life. We could have turned the middle east to glass in three days - and kept the oil, world be damned. We could respond tit for tat with terrorists...kill one of us, we kill 100 of you."
Yes, America balanced the sanctity of human life so well in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and now Iraq. It is indeed tragic that US government propaganda is powerful enough that there are still people out there who believe such tripe. How gracious on the part of the US military machine that it chose not to employ its nuclear arsenal to create a sea of glass in the Middle East. Arabs and Persians, consider yourselves blessed by the wise and benevolent American Empire. I am quite certain that considerations like nuclear fallout, retaliation from other nations with nuclear capabilities, the existence of Israel as part of the Middle East, and major disruption of the world economy (and thus the flow of dollars into the pockets of the US ruling elite) have not dictated the Neocons' restraint.
We have responded to the "terrorists", far beyond "tit for tat". For the 3,000 who died on 9/11 (if one believes the fairy tale version that a handful of poorly trained men armed solely with box cutters perpetrated the atrocity on their own), the ruling elite has killed over 100,000 in Iraq alone.
"The leading cause of poverty is sex. Do you have a cure for that? Are the poor ever to blame in your world? In modern day America any black man without a job who has children is condemning them to poverty. Who is to blame for that? If your parents were poor, and you are poor, how can you reproduce? Why blame any one but the fornicators too stupid, indifferent, or under the influence, for not using condoms?"
Actually, two of the leading causes of poverty are our grossly inequitable public school system which leaves many Black Americans woefully under-educated, and an increasingly unchecked capitalist economic system which ensures that the majority of the wealth remains in the hands of the few. I thought the Eugenics Movement had died, but evidently not.
As for those of you cheerleading the deregulation of businesses, I suggest a review of history. The Gilded Age certainly showered incredible prosperity on a select few in the United States, but the majority of farmers, working class people, and the poor suffered miserably. Without oversight of a government of the people, corporations and businesses in an economic system such as ours grind their employees into dust. Is the name Upton Sinclair ringing any bells?
"Determine why your weaknesses have led you to most closely relate to organizations like Amnesty International, a worthless institution at best, instead of recognizing the real source of problems throughout the world today - Muslim Fundamentalism and Islamic Terrorism."
In the paradigm of the Ugly American, standing with an organization which struggles for the "worthless cause" of universal human rights is a weakness. Only the rights and welfare of a particular segment of American society count in the perverse philosophy of this breed of human. To acknowledge that all people deserve rights and dignity would be an admission of their consent to murder and genocide. Rather than acknowledging that both the US government and Islamic extremists have, and still are, committing homicidal acts, they discount the millions of innocent civilians slaughtered by American state terrorism while focusing on the relatively few Americans who have died at the hands of Islamic extremists. Don’t forget to look at the plank in your own eye….
"You people are are bunch of sick puppies and don't quite get the drift that there are Good Men and Women dying for the likes of you and you ilk. Get a life. America is the Greatest Country this world has ever seen and a bunch of no accounts and self hating (because you have never done anything worth while in you life but live off of others misery that you help create with your stupidity) will never see the day that Real Americans will let you pull the shit you did during Vietnam, what you did then cost the lives of thousands of Good People (unlike you) and are attempting to do now."
The Good People to which this Ugly American appears to be referring were used as pawns (by murderers like Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger) to massacre 3 to 5 million Vietnamese civilians. The range of the number of deaths is so wide because the US military "doesn't do body counts". Our ruling elite sent 59,000 of these Good People to their deaths to perpetuate the military industrial complex and the US push for hegemony. Fortunately for me, I do not have what it takes to fit this reader's definition of a "Real American", nor do I suffer from the delusion that “America is the Greatest Country this world has ever seen”. Like other nations, the United States has faults and is guilty of moral transgressions. In fact, the power it wields magnifies the consequences of its transgressions to a devastating level.
"Until the Darwinian evolutionists can intelligently and convincingly explain WHY apes stopped advancing into mankind and WHEN apes stopped advancing into mankind then there is plenty of room in our schools to teach alternate theories including Intelligent Design.
Do you have the answer to my question above? If you do then please continue along the same vein and answer for me what specie did the Bengal Tiger and African Elephant ascend or descended from as well? No science and no politics please just common sense please."
America, the alleged "leader of the free world", is quite lonely amongst its "constituency" of industrialized nations in its suspicion and outright rejection of science. While the Ugly Americans condemn Islamic nations for their alleged religious extremism, they continue to pit a mythological tale (which has no supporting evidence) against a scientific theory which can be traced back to Lamarck in 1809, has survived scientific scrutiny for almost two hundred years, and is accepted as valid by an overwhelming majority of scientists. A children’s bedtime story called (ironically enough) Intelligent Design, is slowly making its way into the US public school system. I need some clarification now. Who is under the influence of powerful religious extremists?
"There are thousands of cities in this country. We are one of the most economically viable countries in the world and anyone that wants a job can find one; maybe that means one must leave New Orleans....regardless, the opportunity exists. To blame the President for the fact that these people refuse to get off their asses and move into the workforce is not his fault."
Many Americans struggle to find work due to lack of skills and education. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current US unemployment rate is 5% (so much for “anyone” being able to find a job), and many unemployed Americans are untracked for a variety of reasons. The federal minimum wage has remained at the pitifully low $5.75 per hour since 1997. Of those "fortunate" enough to land a job at a "benevolent" corporation like Wal-Mart, they receive grossly inadequate wages and benefits. Opportunities are much broader for some than they are for others. This Ugly American also assumed that all of the victims of Katrina populated the welfare roles, which is false.
Consider this excerpt from http://www.clasp.org/publications/workforce_final.pdf:
"Many of the newly unemployed victims of hurricane Katrina have the skills and resources necessary to rebuild their lives, but others lack marketable skills. Prior to the disaster, educational levels were low in the region. In July, the unemployment rate in New Orleans was 5.6 percent, and nearly a quarter (23 percent) of residents were poor. The median household income for the Biloxi-Gulfport-Pascagoula area was nearly $8,000 below the national average in 2004. Many low-wage workers in the region’s service-dominated economy were just a paycheck away from poverty."
"LBJ created the NO situation with his war on poverty creating a vast useless dependent group of people. It was so evident went the little child was interviewed on TV demanding "his help" unable already at an early age to think of anything but Washington giving him his "help" LBJ's welfare created this mess and people like you keep it going!
Your the racist and white people are the one's you hate! "
Justifying the perpetration of slavery, murder, and obscene discrimination against an entire race of people by attacking the victims is a typical tactic of Ugly Americans. Projection of their own twisted beliefs (like racism) onto others is a powerful psychological defense such people employ. In this case it is enabling them to reconcile their inner conflict between their conscience and their perverse value system. Ironically, millions of white Americans are unconsciously racist, and this individual is obviously one of them.
"I believe the only people who truly have a problem with the Patriot Act are those who have something to hide. I, for one, do not mind giving up a few freedoms, or privacy, to ensure the safety of my country as a whole. The very privacy laws that groups like the ACLU support are used by terrorist and criminals to hide their actions. Those who hide behind our liberal laws have done so long enough; it is time they were reigned in."
The ACLU exists for the purpose of preserving the rights guaranteed to all Americans in the Bill of Rights and subsequent Constitutional Amendments. Privacy is only one right which the ACLU defends. The Patriot Act represents a significant threat many of our civil liberties, including privacy (http://www.aclu.org/Files/OpenFile.cfm?id=11812). The Bush regime loves loyal subjects like this one who are eager to surrender their rights in exchange for the "security" offered by Big Brother.
In light of the fact that many "subversive" librarians are creating roadblocks which interfere with FBI efforts to utilize the Patriot Act to spy on Americans' reading habits, I recently went to my local library and checked out some "anti-American" media, which included:
1. Mao Zedong by Jonathan Spence (books on tape)
2. Hitler's Second Book: the Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
3. Karl Marx by Werner Blumenberg
4. Ho Chi Minh by William J. Duiker
5. Why the Rest Hates the West by Meic Pearse
6. Weather the Underground: The Explosive Story of America's Most Notorious Revolutionaries (DVD documentary)
7. Panther: a Pictorial History of the Black Panthers
8. Fidel Castro by Clive Foss
9. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
10. Terrorism and the Liberal State by Paul Wilkinson
11. Osama: The Making of a Terrorist by Jonathan Randal
I thought I would save some of our tax money by "going public". Now the FBI can monitor a government dissident without wrangling with those "wrong-headed" librarians who still believe in the Bill of Rights. Incidentally, I highly recommend Weather the Underground. It provides compelling evidence that the FBI murdered Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.
Sculpting the psyches of their loyal subjects to create its "base" of war-mongers, racists, worshippers of consumerism, religious fanatics, xenophobes, and complicit accomplices in the murders of millions of human beings around the world, the ruling class of the United States has cemented their hold on power and ensured the continued growth of their staggering wealth. However, evidence continues to emerge to indicate that these Ugly Americans are a minority in the United States with a waning potency. Sagging poll numbers for the Bush regime, increased public support for Bush's impeachment (http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=node/6), increased opposition to the illegal occupation in Iraq, the indictments of Delay and Scooter Libby, and Patrick Fitzgerald's ongoing probe do not bode well for the Bush regime or its cheerleaders.
Despite their recent setbacks, the "true believers" in the American Empire's agenda are wreaking havoc on the world. That is why I continue to participate in protests; educate, persuade, and inform through my dissident writing; maintain Thomas Paine's Corner; support and participate in the ACLU and Amnesty; network with other writers and activists; produce a periodic email newsletter which reaches over 2,000 people; continue to educate myself; teach my children to think critically and act morally; recycle; and boycott corrupt corporate entities like Wal-Mart. I have taught myself Spanish (which has been characterized as the language of the poor and oppressed) so that I can communicate with my Hispanic immigrant clients in my job as a loan counselor. I donate regularly to charities like Oxfam. I vote and write to my representatives in government, despite the seeming futility in doing so. I practice my spiritual values like honesty, responsibility, compassion, loving as an act of will, empathy, assertiveness rather than aggression, hard work, frugality, the use of violence only in defense of family or self, and respecting others and myself. If you have read my writings before, then you are already familiar with my efforts for social justice, peace, intellectual freedom, and human rights. At the risk of sounding repetitive, I have enumerated them again to demonstrate that we do not have to accept the status quo in the US, and that we are not powerless.
On 11/1, I participated in the Center for Constitutional Rights' Fast for Justice. In a largely symbolic act, activists fasted for 24 hours to show solidarity with the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay. The US government has denied these people basic human rights and justice for over three years. If they did commit acts of aggression against our nation, try them, prove it, and punish them. If their innocence is determined, pay them reparations for their suffering and release them. Holding them indefinitely under abusive conditions seriously bastardizes the grand ideals of our Constitution and places our own citizens in jeopardy of similar treatment by other nations.
On the subject of torture, I received the following comment on Thomas Paine’s Corner recently from Wolfgang May:
"Apart from the humanitarian concerns, information obtained through torture is usually unreliable. When I was Intelligence Operations Officer of the 4th US Armored Division in Germany, our professional interrogators told me they tried to develop a rapport with the detainee. This takes a few days, but the information from that effort is usually good. Torture is used only by pathetic, sadistic amateurs. For more info on how the professionals work, read "Talking with Victor Charlie" by Tourison."
Struggling for social justice and peace in “El País de las Pesadillas” (the nation of nightmares) is no easy task, and certainly will not qualify one to win a popularity contest. However, it is well worth the effort. In spite of the overwhelming odds against it, I believe that the United States can become a more just and peaceful nation, and thus enable the world to awaken from its nightmares involving murder and mayhem inflicted by a sadistic maniac named Uncle Sam. Let's work together to make this possible.
---
Jason Miller is a 38 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. He works as a loan counselor in the transportation industry, and is a husband with three sons. His affiliations include Amnesty International and the ACLU. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
As fate would have it, John Hinckley's bullet missed its mark, enabling a malignant scourge of humanity to continue his reign of sadism. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Central American civilians would still be alive were it not for Ronald Reagan. America's steady march back to the "good old days" of Social Darwinism would have been severely retarded. Disciples of Leo Strauss's Machiavellian philosophies would not infect our government as they do today. Yet Reagan survived, social injustice is once again the predominating force in domestic politics, and millions around the world suffer and die as the US government pursues global domination.
Apparently, a fair number of Americans agreed with Joel’s line that the "Sinners are much more fun..." Our government is still dominated by sadistic narcissists who shamelessly mask their avaricious, sanguineous agenda with noble words like freedom, democracy, and liberty. In the US, sociopaths like George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney dominate our government, enabling them to commit heinous crimes against humanity as they feed their obscene appetites for wealth and power. At worst, they caused 9/11. At best, they knew it was coming and allowed nearly 3,000 Americans to die so they could have the "Pearl Harbor" they desperately needed to justify the initiation of their coveted perpetual “war against terrorism". In toppling Saddam Hussein, a ruthless dictator whom it openly supported while he committed acts of genocide in the 1980's, the US government has murdered over a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and 2,000 American service people. In New Orleans, it seized the opportunity of a natural disaster to practice its own version of ethnic cleansing. As they feed their precious military industrial complex while starving domestic programs which foster the well-being of average Americans, the blatant malefactors leading our nation are the enemies of humanity.
As I have sifted through the many emails and comments on my blog (Thomas Paine's Corner) from my more antagonistic readers over the last year, I have concluded that the power moguls in DC are reflections of a significant number of their constituency, despite the fact that the Bush regime resorted to cheating to win the last two presidential elections.
Why are there a significant number of Americans who support the morally reprehensible agenda of the Bush regime and its predecessors? One can point to an array of contributing factors such as insularity from the rest of the world, a bombardment of potent propaganda disseminated by the mainstream media, the hubris which naturally emerges from the unenlightened wielding great power, and a grossly inadequate public education system that "white" washes history. Yet regardless of the root causes, the Ugly American is alive and well. I have learned that the United States is not a particularly friendly environment for proponents of social justice, peace, intellectual freedom, and human rights. The consensus amongst decent human beings (those in the United States and in other nations) is that universal human rights and peaceful co-existence are moral imperatives, but in Pax Americana, many worship the virtual antithesis.
Utilizing snippets and quotes from a variety of correspondences I have received from readers, I have compiled a composite sketch of the narcissistic, selectively misanthropic Ugly Americans who dominate our government, and apparently comprise a fair percentage of our populace. May the Higher Power of each person’s understanding help us if they truly represent a majority. Fortunately, in spite of their arrogant belief to the contrary, it is highly unlikely that they do.
"You say you are anti-war. I say I am anti-death. The difference between you and the 50% of this country who support Bush is that you need to learn the hard way there just is no such thing as anti-war when thy enemies will stop at absolutely nothing to destroy you."
CBS News poll results released on 11-3-05 showed a 35% job approval rating for George Bush. The United States government, as an entity, is an enemy to the human race. If it ceased killing civilians (i.e. the 3 to 5 million in Vietnam), it would stop creating enemies. Besides, the United States has not been invaded since the War of 1812, and 9/11 was perpetrated with the endorsement and/or assistance of our own government. Anti-death? Our government specializes in the murder of innocents to achieve its goal of hegemony. As for the true enemy, it gazes back at many of our leaders and their sycophants each time they stare in the mirror.
"Most important, Jason: Your march was not covered because the vast majority of US knows that you are silly and insignificant. That your short sightedness will only become evident to you when a terrorist sets a bomb next to you because you are a white American and you believe in Jesus, not allah (They really don't care whether you do or not Jason)."
If marching on Washington DC in support of peace and social justice qualifies me as "silly and insignificant", sign me up for a life-time contract. I will leave war, murder, hate, torture and racism to the "serious and significant" of the world. Propaganda pitting Christianity against Islam as a "good versus evil" dichotomy has obviously achieved a measure of success in America. I wonder if the 100,000 "brown" Iraqis who believed in Allah realized their "short-sightedness" as the American military machine slaughtered them.
"We balance the sanctity of human life better than any country on earth. We are violent, true, but we have had to be. Ironically, the things that have happened to us are because of our stance on human life. We could have turned the middle east to glass in three days - and kept the oil, world be damned. We could respond tit for tat with terrorists...kill one of us, we kill 100 of you."
Yes, America balanced the sanctity of human life so well in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and now Iraq. It is indeed tragic that US government propaganda is powerful enough that there are still people out there who believe such tripe. How gracious on the part of the US military machine that it chose not to employ its nuclear arsenal to create a sea of glass in the Middle East. Arabs and Persians, consider yourselves blessed by the wise and benevolent American Empire. I am quite certain that considerations like nuclear fallout, retaliation from other nations with nuclear capabilities, the existence of Israel as part of the Middle East, and major disruption of the world economy (and thus the flow of dollars into the pockets of the US ruling elite) have not dictated the Neocons' restraint.
We have responded to the "terrorists", far beyond "tit for tat". For the 3,000 who died on 9/11 (if one believes the fairy tale version that a handful of poorly trained men armed solely with box cutters perpetrated the atrocity on their own), the ruling elite has killed over 100,000 in Iraq alone.
"The leading cause of poverty is sex. Do you have a cure for that? Are the poor ever to blame in your world? In modern day America any black man without a job who has children is condemning them to poverty. Who is to blame for that? If your parents were poor, and you are poor, how can you reproduce? Why blame any one but the fornicators too stupid, indifferent, or under the influence, for not using condoms?"
Actually, two of the leading causes of poverty are our grossly inequitable public school system which leaves many Black Americans woefully under-educated, and an increasingly unchecked capitalist economic system which ensures that the majority of the wealth remains in the hands of the few. I thought the Eugenics Movement had died, but evidently not.
As for those of you cheerleading the deregulation of businesses, I suggest a review of history. The Gilded Age certainly showered incredible prosperity on a select few in the United States, but the majority of farmers, working class people, and the poor suffered miserably. Without oversight of a government of the people, corporations and businesses in an economic system such as ours grind their employees into dust. Is the name Upton Sinclair ringing any bells?
"Determine why your weaknesses have led you to most closely relate to organizations like Amnesty International, a worthless institution at best, instead of recognizing the real source of problems throughout the world today - Muslim Fundamentalism and Islamic Terrorism."
In the paradigm of the Ugly American, standing with an organization which struggles for the "worthless cause" of universal human rights is a weakness. Only the rights and welfare of a particular segment of American society count in the perverse philosophy of this breed of human. To acknowledge that all people deserve rights and dignity would be an admission of their consent to murder and genocide. Rather than acknowledging that both the US government and Islamic extremists have, and still are, committing homicidal acts, they discount the millions of innocent civilians slaughtered by American state terrorism while focusing on the relatively few Americans who have died at the hands of Islamic extremists. Don’t forget to look at the plank in your own eye….
"You people are are bunch of sick puppies and don't quite get the drift that there are Good Men and Women dying for the likes of you and you ilk. Get a life. America is the Greatest Country this world has ever seen and a bunch of no accounts and self hating (because you have never done anything worth while in you life but live off of others misery that you help create with your stupidity) will never see the day that Real Americans will let you pull the shit you did during Vietnam, what you did then cost the lives of thousands of Good People (unlike you) and are attempting to do now."
The Good People to which this Ugly American appears to be referring were used as pawns (by murderers like Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger) to massacre 3 to 5 million Vietnamese civilians. The range of the number of deaths is so wide because the US military "doesn't do body counts". Our ruling elite sent 59,000 of these Good People to their deaths to perpetuate the military industrial complex and the US push for hegemony. Fortunately for me, I do not have what it takes to fit this reader's definition of a "Real American", nor do I suffer from the delusion that “America is the Greatest Country this world has ever seen”. Like other nations, the United States has faults and is guilty of moral transgressions. In fact, the power it wields magnifies the consequences of its transgressions to a devastating level.
"Until the Darwinian evolutionists can intelligently and convincingly explain WHY apes stopped advancing into mankind and WHEN apes stopped advancing into mankind then there is plenty of room in our schools to teach alternate theories including Intelligent Design.
Do you have the answer to my question above? If you do then please continue along the same vein and answer for me what specie did the Bengal Tiger and African Elephant ascend or descended from as well? No science and no politics please just common sense please."
America, the alleged "leader of the free world", is quite lonely amongst its "constituency" of industrialized nations in its suspicion and outright rejection of science. While the Ugly Americans condemn Islamic nations for their alleged religious extremism, they continue to pit a mythological tale (which has no supporting evidence) against a scientific theory which can be traced back to Lamarck in 1809, has survived scientific scrutiny for almost two hundred years, and is accepted as valid by an overwhelming majority of scientists. A children’s bedtime story called (ironically enough) Intelligent Design, is slowly making its way into the US public school system. I need some clarification now. Who is under the influence of powerful religious extremists?
"There are thousands of cities in this country. We are one of the most economically viable countries in the world and anyone that wants a job can find one; maybe that means one must leave New Orleans....regardless, the opportunity exists. To blame the President for the fact that these people refuse to get off their asses and move into the workforce is not his fault."
Many Americans struggle to find work due to lack of skills and education. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current US unemployment rate is 5% (so much for “anyone” being able to find a job), and many unemployed Americans are untracked for a variety of reasons. The federal minimum wage has remained at the pitifully low $5.75 per hour since 1997. Of those "fortunate" enough to land a job at a "benevolent" corporation like Wal-Mart, they receive grossly inadequate wages and benefits. Opportunities are much broader for some than they are for others. This Ugly American also assumed that all of the victims of Katrina populated the welfare roles, which is false.
Consider this excerpt from http://www.clasp.org/publications/workforce_final.pdf:
"Many of the newly unemployed victims of hurricane Katrina have the skills and resources necessary to rebuild their lives, but others lack marketable skills. Prior to the disaster, educational levels were low in the region. In July, the unemployment rate in New Orleans was 5.6 percent, and nearly a quarter (23 percent) of residents were poor. The median household income for the Biloxi-Gulfport-Pascagoula area was nearly $8,000 below the national average in 2004. Many low-wage workers in the region’s service-dominated economy were just a paycheck away from poverty."
"LBJ created the NO situation with his war on poverty creating a vast useless dependent group of people. It was so evident went the little child was interviewed on TV demanding "his help" unable already at an early age to think of anything but Washington giving him his "help" LBJ's welfare created this mess and people like you keep it going!
Your the racist and white people are the one's you hate! "
Justifying the perpetration of slavery, murder, and obscene discrimination against an entire race of people by attacking the victims is a typical tactic of Ugly Americans. Projection of their own twisted beliefs (like racism) onto others is a powerful psychological defense such people employ. In this case it is enabling them to reconcile their inner conflict between their conscience and their perverse value system. Ironically, millions of white Americans are unconsciously racist, and this individual is obviously one of them.
"I believe the only people who truly have a problem with the Patriot Act are those who have something to hide. I, for one, do not mind giving up a few freedoms, or privacy, to ensure the safety of my country as a whole. The very privacy laws that groups like the ACLU support are used by terrorist and criminals to hide their actions. Those who hide behind our liberal laws have done so long enough; it is time they were reigned in."
The ACLU exists for the purpose of preserving the rights guaranteed to all Americans in the Bill of Rights and subsequent Constitutional Amendments. Privacy is only one right which the ACLU defends. The Patriot Act represents a significant threat many of our civil liberties, including privacy (http://www.aclu.org/Files/OpenFile.cfm?id=11812). The Bush regime loves loyal subjects like this one who are eager to surrender their rights in exchange for the "security" offered by Big Brother.
In light of the fact that many "subversive" librarians are creating roadblocks which interfere with FBI efforts to utilize the Patriot Act to spy on Americans' reading habits, I recently went to my local library and checked out some "anti-American" media, which included:
1. Mao Zedong by Jonathan Spence (books on tape)
2. Hitler's Second Book: the Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
3. Karl Marx by Werner Blumenberg
4. Ho Chi Minh by William J. Duiker
5. Why the Rest Hates the West by Meic Pearse
6. Weather the Underground: The Explosive Story of America's Most Notorious Revolutionaries (DVD documentary)
7. Panther: a Pictorial History of the Black Panthers
8. Fidel Castro by Clive Foss
9. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
10. Terrorism and the Liberal State by Paul Wilkinson
11. Osama: The Making of a Terrorist by Jonathan Randal
I thought I would save some of our tax money by "going public". Now the FBI can monitor a government dissident without wrangling with those "wrong-headed" librarians who still believe in the Bill of Rights. Incidentally, I highly recommend Weather the Underground. It provides compelling evidence that the FBI murdered Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.
Sculpting the psyches of their loyal subjects to create its "base" of war-mongers, racists, worshippers of consumerism, religious fanatics, xenophobes, and complicit accomplices in the murders of millions of human beings around the world, the ruling class of the United States has cemented their hold on power and ensured the continued growth of their staggering wealth. However, evidence continues to emerge to indicate that these Ugly Americans are a minority in the United States with a waning potency. Sagging poll numbers for the Bush regime, increased public support for Bush's impeachment (http://www.impeachpac.org/?q=node/6), increased opposition to the illegal occupation in Iraq, the indictments of Delay and Scooter Libby, and Patrick Fitzgerald's ongoing probe do not bode well for the Bush regime or its cheerleaders.
Despite their recent setbacks, the "true believers" in the American Empire's agenda are wreaking havoc on the world. That is why I continue to participate in protests; educate, persuade, and inform through my dissident writing; maintain Thomas Paine's Corner; support and participate in the ACLU and Amnesty; network with other writers and activists; produce a periodic email newsletter which reaches over 2,000 people; continue to educate myself; teach my children to think critically and act morally; recycle; and boycott corrupt corporate entities like Wal-Mart. I have taught myself Spanish (which has been characterized as the language of the poor and oppressed) so that I can communicate with my Hispanic immigrant clients in my job as a loan counselor. I donate regularly to charities like Oxfam. I vote and write to my representatives in government, despite the seeming futility in doing so. I practice my spiritual values like honesty, responsibility, compassion, loving as an act of will, empathy, assertiveness rather than aggression, hard work, frugality, the use of violence only in defense of family or self, and respecting others and myself. If you have read my writings before, then you are already familiar with my efforts for social justice, peace, intellectual freedom, and human rights. At the risk of sounding repetitive, I have enumerated them again to demonstrate that we do not have to accept the status quo in the US, and that we are not powerless.
On 11/1, I participated in the Center for Constitutional Rights' Fast for Justice. In a largely symbolic act, activists fasted for 24 hours to show solidarity with the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay. The US government has denied these people basic human rights and justice for over three years. If they did commit acts of aggression against our nation, try them, prove it, and punish them. If their innocence is determined, pay them reparations for their suffering and release them. Holding them indefinitely under abusive conditions seriously bastardizes the grand ideals of our Constitution and places our own citizens in jeopardy of similar treatment by other nations.
On the subject of torture, I received the following comment on Thomas Paine’s Corner recently from Wolfgang May:
"Apart from the humanitarian concerns, information obtained through torture is usually unreliable. When I was Intelligence Operations Officer of the 4th US Armored Division in Germany, our professional interrogators told me they tried to develop a rapport with the detainee. This takes a few days, but the information from that effort is usually good. Torture is used only by pathetic, sadistic amateurs. For more info on how the professionals work, read "Talking with Victor Charlie" by Tourison."
Struggling for social justice and peace in “El País de las Pesadillas” (the nation of nightmares) is no easy task, and certainly will not qualify one to win a popularity contest. However, it is well worth the effort. In spite of the overwhelming odds against it, I believe that the United States can become a more just and peaceful nation, and thus enable the world to awaken from its nightmares involving murder and mayhem inflicted by a sadistic maniac named Uncle Sam. Let's work together to make this possible.
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Jason Miller is a 38 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. He works as a loan counselor in the transportation industry, and is a husband with three sons. His affiliations include Amnesty International and the ACLU. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.