[NV Greens] Fwd: [usgp-dx] U.S. in Deep Danger Under Mr. Bush

Mon Mar 28 22:46:13 PST 2005

>Another MUST read.
>
>
>Hi:  Please read this.  Democracy in the U.S. is in jeopardy under Mr.
>Bush.  There are intimations of Germany in the 30s, as many people have
>observed.  Peace. Richard.  P.S.  If you think these concerns are valid,
>please distribute this widely. It appeared in the Monday, March 28 edition
>of The Providence Journal.
>
>
>Jerry M. Landay: The new aristocracy
>
>01:00 AM EST on Monday, March 28, 2005
>
>I AM SCANNING A LIST of the 154 federal programs that President Bush would
>either zero out or slash in his fiscal-2006 budget, which Congress is now
>considering. It represents a triumph for the handful who -- with Bush
>conservatism's chief cheerleader and theoretician, Grover Norquist --
>would "drown" the federal government "in the bathtub." In fact, it is an
>American tragedy in the making: a blot on our collective soul.
>
>The wreckage is breathtaking. It includes termination of a program that
>tests bio-engineered food safety. Also proposed for axing are conservation
>programs for American forests and energy, flood prevention, funds for
>studies in advanced technologies, vital public telecommunications
>facilities (such as Internet access for schools and libraries), drug-free
>school programs, workers' job retraining, vocational rehabilitation,
>enhanced teaching quality, adult education, community service, child
>emergency medical services, disease control and prevention, land and water
>conservation, rural fire-fighting facilities, hiring of police, protection
>of national parks, education of migrant farm workers, the miraculous
>Hubble space telescope, high-speed rail (advanced transportation long
>enjoyed in Europe and Japan), and vocational assistance for veterans.
>
>Meanwhile, major budget reductions are proposed for, among other things,
>medical care for those in need, watershed rehabilitation, environmental
>quality, research in nonfossil-fuel alternatives, and programs for the
>disabled and for children's hospitals.
>
>The costs to America are incalculable.
>
>Highlighted against these dismal prospects is the $100 billion-plus in
>fiscal 2006 that Bush wants to spend for fighting and nation building in
>Iraq and Afghanistan, and for maintaining a permanent military presence in
>the Mideast -- even as the revenue hemorrhage of tax cuts in time of "war"
>continues for a narrow elite of corporate and inherited wealth. This is
>creating a permanent new American aristocracy, while starving the federal
>government of billions.
>
>In 2004, the 20 percent of households with the lowest incomes received an
>average tax cut of $250; the middle 20 percent received an average tax cut
>of $1,090; and the top 20 percent were blessed with tax reductions
>averaging $78,460. A third of the tax breaks -- which Bush wants to make
>permanent -- goes to the top 1 percent of households, those with an
>average annual income of $1.2 million.
>
>In an article highly critical of Bush economic policy, Nelson W. Aldrich
>Jr., who bears a vaunted "old-money" family name, writes, "To him who hath
>more, more will be given."
>
>Few of the "hath littles" are aware of what's being done to them. The
>middle and blue-collar classes are victims of declining wages, ever-higher
>health-care costs, and other price hikes -- led by energy costs, the
>highest in history, and climbing. Behind the smokescreen of a glorious
>"patriotic war," fear of terrorism, and pumped-up religious fervor lies a
>home-front war against the middle and blue-collar classes: a conservative
>counter-revolution, which aims at a colossal redistribution of wealth
>upward, to the New Aristocracy -- supported by a self-serving rewriting of
>the law based not on legal principle but on "free-market" theory.
>
>The intended result is the creation of a "peasant" class, driven to the
>bottom by the need to compete against cheap labor pools, such as India's
>and China's, working for the bargain-basement wages that are all the
>big-business scrooges will dole out.
>
>With corporations unwilling to share their productivity gains with
>workers, as in the old days, and the American union movement in tatters,
>America's struggling wage earners confront a sad irony: a nation
>originally dedicated to dissolving ancient European class distinctions is
>now being driven backward into another feudal age.
>
>America should be undergoing a profound crisis of conscience. Instead,
>this is a time of great silence.
>
>While Bush engages in the flowery rhetoric of freedom for other nations,
>citizens here look enviously to the political ferment in Ukraine and
>Lebanon for examples of the political activism once made in America. Our
>great heritage of labor rights, civil rights, rights to clean air and
>water, and rights to a fair wage now exist only in faint memory. Even our
>rights to secure Social Security and medical programs -- taken for granted
>in Europe -- are under assault.
>
>In the face of this Grand Retreat, why are we so passive? Why are no angry
>Americans taking to the streets? Why did 59 million voters, most of them
>victims of Bush's economic tyranny, vote for George W. Bush and his party
>against their own best interests? Why, in short, did the victims become
>their own social executioners?
>
>History is replete with examples of willing self-enslavement. Consider why
>so many Americans supported the Iraq war. One explanation comes from
>Hermann Goering, the loyal Hitler lieutenant who shortly before committing
>suicide said in a prison interview: "People don't want to go to war[but]
>the people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is
>easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and
>denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to
>greater danger."
>
>The basis of such submission is explained in the classic experiment in
>obedience by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.
>
>Passing himself off as an authority figure by wearing white medical garb,
>he asked ordinary citizens to administer electric shocks to a "victim"
>each time a "subject" erred in a word test. The whole thing was a set-up,
>but the volunteers didn't know this. Accordingly, each time the "subject"
>missed a word, the citizens agreed to increase the voltage. Some 65
>percent of them wound up gleefully calling on Milgram to administer lethal
>shocks, despite the pleadings of the "victim." We are, in short, willing
>to be our own executioners.
>
>Milgram concluded: "It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to any
>lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding
>of the study."
>
>When will America of the free and the brave recover its courage to
>challenge authority that is so self-servingly dangerous? It is clear -- as
>Ukraine, Lebanon, and our own history demonstrate -- that there comes a
>tipping point when citizens regain consciousness and conscience, and
>rebel.
>
>This moment had best come soon -- or it may never come at all.
>
>Jerry M. Landay, of Bristol, a former CBS News correspondent, is an
>occasional contributor.
>
>	"The only way out of our crisis (terrorism) is to reduce the 
>anger of the
>most rational, thus also reducing the constituency of the least rational."
>  Sam Smith.
>
>	"When they come for the innocent without crossing over
>your body, cursed be your religion and your life."  Anon.  But often
>quoted by Dorothy Day.
>--
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>"Richard Walton" <richard at soup.org>
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand