Is the United States a democracy?
The executive has the ability to kill US citizens without charging them with a crime. This is in direct contradiction of Habeus Corpus.
The united states has been occupying Afghanistan for more than a Decade, without specific legislation declaring war. Instead a state of exception in which the Executive has sole authority to decide when to prosecute war has become the norm.This is in direct contradiction to the war powers act and the constitutionally explicit rules governing warmaking.
The United States has been occupying Iraq for nine years. Originally people scoffed at Wolfowitz saying we could be there until 2010. This war was clearly an illegal pre-emptive strike by the United States. The justifications for invasion turned out to be complete bullshit: WMDs, yellow cake from Niger, active chem. weapons, complicity with 9/11, and harboring of Al-qaeda have all turned out to be false. When revelations of these lies started to be printed there was no mandate for intervention. The public has not supported this war once given halfway decent information. Before the media realized the bullshit it was peddling a majority of Americans actually believed Saddam had something to do with 9/11. There has NEVER been any evidence of this, a potential meeting between a jihadist does not mean that Saddam is al-qaeda, if you think that evidence is convincing you don't understand what Al-Qaeda and Ba'athism are. Saddam is a ba'athist which is essentially the IRaqi version of Nasserism, generally it can be described as an arab nationalism, sometimes being pan-arab and socialist. Ba'athists are secular, ok? If you weren't aware of these nuances are you starting to see my point? How does al-qaeda feel about secularists? Saddam and what we call "al-qaeda" (which appears to be a phrase that is applied to any Muslim who believes that temporal and spiritual power should be more conflated[Shariah]) hate eachother!
Wealth has been and will be continuing to shift towards the super-rich, which means less money for the other 99% as this chart shows.
Inflation adjusted percentage increase in mean after-tax household income in the United States between 1979 and 2005.
That statistical data is old though, this process has accelerated since 2005 as a result of numerous events, the most important in my opinion being rising gas prices driven by rising oil prices. Because its pretty fucking obvious that if you keep taking something, and you start to take it faster and faster. Eventually you will run out, because all things are finite. Whether that means you run out in a million years or tomorrow is of little relevance, the fact remains that demand will begin outstripping supply on carbon based energy sources. The demand will continue to accelerate, but once supply shocks occur, the acceleration will increase exponentially. In my opinion we are nearing the end of the age of oil. The scrambling for practices of resource gathering which is far worse for the environment and produces less product, is evidence for my belief. Shale gas and tar sands being my examples. Because capitalism claims that it will solve peak oil by causing it to be such a high price that alternatives will appear. But these alternatives are just much worse versions of the original, and really just amount to grasping at straws. There is no effort to get in to rehab for our addiction to carbon energy.
I apologize for digressing, but my point is that there are currently structural factors which have further accelerated the wealth redistribution that we see taking place from 1979-2005. The middle class is being destroyed further. A post-industrial service based economy does not produce a strong middle class in the first place, if we add rising living costs and shrinking salaries/wages we will see a slow destruction of the middle class.
Most political theorists will agree that the middle class is where most of the stability for any regime is located. These are all individuals with a vested interest in making the system work, they are reformers because the system rewards them with a decent lifestyle. An evaporation of the middle class creates revolutionary instability because the lower class does not have a vested interest in maintaining the system of the status quo, they don't have much to lose. Whoever the boss is, they're going to go to work at their job and have the same skills they had before. They will still fit in to the same niche in the world economy no matter the regime. The upper-class being small cannot resist these changes.
My first point is that democracy in America is not a very convincing argument right now. Although materialism is important, (one must eat and stay warm) it is also important to know there is no point in living if you are going to be evil. Economic concerns are important, but we must also pay attention to Politics(which is the ability to justifiably kill people) because the two are related. The United States spends as much as the next 27 countries combined on their military. The US with its huge GDP even has the highest PERCENTAGE of gdp that goes towards military spending. The global civil war that the United States is prosecuting must stop if we are to save the middle class(which in my opinion is of more concern than the entire 99%, because the middle class is key to the stability of any regime).
My second point is that the upper-class should be embracing the messsages of occupy wall street, because without some sort of reform to save the middle class united states might see some REAL class warfare.
It does make me smirk when I think of a wealthy politician, who proclaimed attention to class in discourse as "class warfare", being killed by the real revolutionaries we will see if current trends continue, but violence is a question without a satisfactory answer.
We do not need to fear revolution, because if we do not have a democracy what the fuck do we have to lose?
We do not need to stoke revolution, because the structural trends will make one inevitable.
To those who are trying to silence or marginalize Occupy Wall Street: Don't blow your one chance to reform the system before you make peaceful revolution impossible.
The executive has the ability to kill US citizens without charging them with a crime. This is in direct contradiction of Habeus Corpus.
The united states has been occupying Afghanistan for more than a Decade, without specific legislation declaring war. Instead a state of exception in which the Executive has sole authority to decide when to prosecute war has become the norm.This is in direct contradiction to the war powers act and the constitutionally explicit rules governing warmaking.
The United States has been occupying Iraq for nine years. Originally people scoffed at Wolfowitz saying we could be there until 2010. This war was clearly an illegal pre-emptive strike by the United States. The justifications for invasion turned out to be complete bullshit: WMDs, yellow cake from Niger, active chem. weapons, complicity with 9/11, and harboring of Al-qaeda have all turned out to be false. When revelations of these lies started to be printed there was no mandate for intervention. The public has not supported this war once given halfway decent information. Before the media realized the bullshit it was peddling a majority of Americans actually believed Saddam had something to do with 9/11. There has NEVER been any evidence of this, a potential meeting between a jihadist does not mean that Saddam is al-qaeda, if you think that evidence is convincing you don't understand what Al-Qaeda and Ba'athism are. Saddam is a ba'athist which is essentially the IRaqi version of Nasserism, generally it can be described as an arab nationalism, sometimes being pan-arab and socialist. Ba'athists are secular, ok? If you weren't aware of these nuances are you starting to see my point? How does al-qaeda feel about secularists? Saddam and what we call "al-qaeda" (which appears to be a phrase that is applied to any Muslim who believes that temporal and spiritual power should be more conflated[Shariah]) hate eachother!
Wealth has been and will be continuing to shift towards the super-rich, which means less money for the other 99% as this chart shows.
Inflation adjusted percentage increase in mean after-tax household income in the United States between 1979 and 2005.
That statistical data is old though, this process has accelerated since 2005 as a result of numerous events, the most important in my opinion being rising gas prices driven by rising oil prices. Because its pretty fucking obvious that if you keep taking something, and you start to take it faster and faster. Eventually you will run out, because all things are finite. Whether that means you run out in a million years or tomorrow is of little relevance, the fact remains that demand will begin outstripping supply on carbon based energy sources. The demand will continue to accelerate, but once supply shocks occur, the acceleration will increase exponentially. In my opinion we are nearing the end of the age of oil. The scrambling for practices of resource gathering which is far worse for the environment and produces less product, is evidence for my belief. Shale gas and tar sands being my examples. Because capitalism claims that it will solve peak oil by causing it to be such a high price that alternatives will appear. But these alternatives are just much worse versions of the original, and really just amount to grasping at straws. There is no effort to get in to rehab for our addiction to carbon energy.
I apologize for digressing, but my point is that there are currently structural factors which have further accelerated the wealth redistribution that we see taking place from 1979-2005. The middle class is being destroyed further. A post-industrial service based economy does not produce a strong middle class in the first place, if we add rising living costs and shrinking salaries/wages we will see a slow destruction of the middle class.
Most political theorists will agree that the middle class is where most of the stability for any regime is located. These are all individuals with a vested interest in making the system work, they are reformers because the system rewards them with a decent lifestyle. An evaporation of the middle class creates revolutionary instability because the lower class does not have a vested interest in maintaining the system of the status quo, they don't have much to lose. Whoever the boss is, they're going to go to work at their job and have the same skills they had before. They will still fit in to the same niche in the world economy no matter the regime. The upper-class being small cannot resist these changes.
My first point is that democracy in America is not a very convincing argument right now. Although materialism is important, (one must eat and stay warm) it is also important to know there is no point in living if you are going to be evil. Economic concerns are important, but we must also pay attention to Politics(which is the ability to justifiably kill people) because the two are related. The United States spends as much as the next 27 countries combined on their military. The US with its huge GDP even has the highest PERCENTAGE of gdp that goes towards military spending. The global civil war that the United States is prosecuting must stop if we are to save the middle class(which in my opinion is of more concern than the entire 99%, because the middle class is key to the stability of any regime).
My second point is that the upper-class should be embracing the messsages of occupy wall street, because without some sort of reform to save the middle class united states might see some REAL class warfare.
It does make me smirk when I think of a wealthy politician, who proclaimed attention to class in discourse as "class warfare", being killed by the real revolutionaries we will see if current trends continue, but violence is a question without a satisfactory answer.
We do not need to fear revolution, because if we do not have a democracy what the fuck do we have to lose?
We do not need to stoke revolution, because the structural trends will make one inevitable.
To those who are trying to silence or marginalize Occupy Wall Street: Don't blow your one chance to reform the system before you make peaceful revolution impossible.
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