America

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.

Revolution in the Middle East

In Tunisia there were popular protests that caused a president to resign in a currently boiling over endless struggle of politics.  In Egypt there are similar protests going on in another active struggle for democracy.


In my opinion one cannot "have" a democracy, one can only constantly (re)create a democracy which if it were truly investigated is hardly democracy. Which is why one must keep reaching for democracy as if one does not have it, but this process of reaching for democracy is itself the closest thing to actually "having" democracy. The protests (or to put it in a different way to leave the negative connotations our corporate media has attached to that word): "a conglomeration of public politically active peoples" is a good thing in any country. People need to engage in the political process as individuals not as pieces of an illusory homogenized whole that is then "represented". As an individual against orthodoxy, I would like to explain why I can hold such a view when I am critical of all epistemologies because of internal contradictions.



It is my belief that the best way to explain anything is to historicize it. How can I justify holding a belief that people within any country no matter how the government is labeled(democracy, dictatorship, oligarchy etc.) will benefit from actively engaging the political process?



Lets start with Egypt, which is the center of a question for US policy right now: Should the US support the protesters against one of the largest recipients of U.S. Aid? Support the protestors against the regime which moderated enough to recognize Israel(thats why the Aid)? Support the protestors against the regime which houses many of their CIA black sites?



The easy answer for the United States is to just be quiet and stay in the background like Tunisia. The problem with that is that silence is violence for the United States, because of its ubiquity in the domestic governments of many countries. Current  conceptions of sovereignty which are not fluid cannot recognize that the United States is in many ways a de facto world government. Certain countries have surrendered autonomy in certain places to get things from the hegemon(US). In Okinawa the soldiers can rape, murder, and drive drunk all day. They can't be prosecuted, because of the Status of Force Agreement between Japan and the US. This is in return for the United States military protection of their country cerntrally and military protection of the energy supply more loosely. When the United States does nothing about a spontaneous flare up of democratic tendencies, it is giving an OK to the regime which will tamp it down.
The United States should not take the easy way out and instead follow the advice of Jefferson and MLK jr: democratic revolution. The american revolution was not a divinely ordained event and it did not expose any universal truths. What I mean to say by these two qualities is that the american revolution can be exported, what I mean by the latter is that this revolution is not a universal truth so we should not engage in violence which would be an action of forcing democracy on a people which is a farce as we see in Iraq. The revolution should be exported, but with ideas and support(monetary, logistical). The only problem is that our revolution was too violent, our country was created by terrorists, in order to make sure that part of our revolution doesn't get exported we need to support peaceful revolutions WHENEVER the opportunity presents itself. Like in Tunisia and Egypt. But that is simply an ethical concern, why would I really be able to justify such a strong statement that these flare-ups of democracy are good and crushing them is bad?


The only justified knowledge comes from history, so lets look specifically at Egypt. Egypt was a country colonized by multiple powers, but eventually the British got a monopoly. During this time Britain controlled the political apparatus of Egypt through their puppets the Monarchs. Eventually nationalist groups or groups that are united by their national identity starting growing. These individuals felt that monarchs who pretended to be pious while allowing Britain to run the country were not good for their interests. Many nationalist uprisings were slaughtered by the British. In an example of where democratic action was not allowed to happen by an overbearing government. In a policy that is still alive today in Egypt any political parties had to be licensed in a process that no party except those which were puppets of Britain were allowed to exist. In this context the Society of The Muslim Brethren was formed. Religion being the one area which the regime would shy away from regulating. This society was a welfare and community service oriented entity. Through writing, criticizing, and activism using religion as the justification for demands the Muslim Brotherhood made attempts to better the political situation of Egyptians who faced an uncaring colonial power and later an autocratic nationalist regime.

The next generation of Brotherhood leaders included an individual named Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was put in prison and tortured for his political activism. Many other members of the brotherhood were treated in similar ways. The torture effected Qutb's outlook and thusly influenced the outlook of the entire Muslim Brotherhood, which by this time had proved a huge success (in terms of membership) with international potential. Qutb essentially opted out of the peaceful means of his predecessors. How can one be peaceful and criticize through the language of Islam, but face torture and imprisonment for it? What was the brotherhood going to gain from repeating this process? The people in power will stay in power and people who speak out for Muslims or Egyptians will receive the worst of all possible existences: life as torture. It was time to turn the page on these ineffective attempts at democracy and take a cue from the American Revolution: use violence.

Qutb became a lionized figure of violent jihad to such a degree, that it is impossible to imagine 9/11 without the life experience and subsequent writings of Qutb. I do not mean to say that Qutb bears responsibility for 9/11 and I do not mean to say that the hijackers, wahabbi, saudi, or pakistan do not bear their responsibility. I am only pointing out that things become possible by their historical trajectory. If Britain had brought democratic reforms they might still be in a great mutual beneficial relationship with Egypt, far more advantageous to Britain in the long run then blowing money keeping democracy down and eventually getting thrown out. If the nationalists had learned from the mistakes of the monarchs/britain and made political parties an accepted part of democracy the Brethren wouldn't have had to go underground. If the Egyptian government hadn't been dead set on imprisoning, torturing, and martyring the leaders of a religious movement maybe violent jihadis wouldn't have so much motivation and empirical evidence for the justification of violence.

Non-violent democracy should be cherished and supported. If one does not support such events, there are two alternatives: do nothing or actively destroy. Doing nothing is seen as complicity with the current regime, because of the close relationship Egypt has with the United States, they cannot feign ignorance with such a key ally. Which means they lend legitimacy to the efforts of the Egyptian government to actively destroy. This has taken the form of violent counter-democratic actions: beatings, chemical warfare, rubber bullets, etc.

When groups attempt to achieve their agenda peacefully and are met with violence, these groups learn that they cannot achieve their agenda peacefully. This leaves one option: violence.

If instead when groups attempt to achieve their agenda peacefully they are met with debate and compromise, that group will feel that they have won and will feel empowered by their inclusion in the political process, reducing the probability of violence to a negligible amount.

If we don't want more Al-Qaedas and more violent idealogues with the scars to justify such venom, then we should use our foreign policy to support groups who engage in the political process.

America, Imagine if you will...

A 90% election turnout...Bullshit its not possible.

1.People who cannot vote for the two parties always votes for a third party, and thus realizes their vote is pointless and usually doesn't vote at all.

2.People who vote for the two parties know whether they're in a swing state, so don't give a shit if the polls show a win.

3.Other people who vote for the two parties are just lazy and literally just don't do it even though they're fully conscious of the LEADERSHIP OF THE ENTIRE EXECUTIVE BRANCH changing hands that day.

4.People who don't vote for any party, think that their vote doesn't count and its always going to stay the same, rich get richer and poor get slavery/prison; and/or politicians are only in it for self-interest/money and power.


One-by-one

1. Unless people vote for third parties the republidemocraticans are never going to do anything but smear eachother.

2.Getting rid of the electoral college would allow everyone's vote to count and would make every individual vote equal to every other individual vote.

3.Wake up! What?! You don't think politics is that important? **Holocaust** You don't think politics is important? **Hiroshima,Nagasaki** Maybe you're right? **Gulags** You know I'm startin' to come around to your point of view. **Vietnam** I mean seriously who needs politics? **Apartheid** You know I can just concern myself with draft picks and new beer commercials.**Slavery** I mean its not like politics changes anything. **indigenous Americans** Its not like paying attention could change anything.**Iran-Contra** Yep, fuck politics, that could never happen here anyway.**ABU GHRAIB GAUNTANIMO DASHT-I-LEILI GENEVA CONVENTIONS** yah fuck politics.

4.It will stay the same...unless we all start voting to hold these assholes accountable.How many senators voted for the patriot act? How many for the Iraq war? How many voted to give bush jr. emergency powers to declare war on anyone he saw fit to defend us in the so-called "war on terrorism"? Why are they still in office? These asshole politicians not only think we're too dumb to understand that war is just war because its fought by states and terrorism is terrorism, because its fought by small groups of peoples; when they're the exact same thing. Ok fine you have watched too much fox news, you actually think that our laser guided bombs with cameras riding on them blowing up "a target" as well as innocent men, women, and children where they live, WHERE THEY LIVE! IS NOT FUCKING TERROR, THEN FUCK YOU! War is terrorism, "targets" and "collateral damage" get hit........I'm waiting for your train of thought.....That's right I know what you're thinking just keep going......Bam! You got it "Fuck you jimothy terrorists SEEK civilians for newspaper headlines".....*ahem* Every one of those laser guided bombs the brand new MOAB every time they're detonated it is far more likely than not, that a human not on the "targets" list has died. I mean doesn't that make you feel like a coward, these people(albeit brainwashed by religious wackos) are willing to throw their own life away at any point to kill a few of their "enemies", whereas we have laser guided bombs, or troops armed with every technology possible, killing our "enemies".
Go ask someone from Nicaragua about how the US doesn't seek out civilians in conflicts it is involved in(they just don't do it for headlines), or how about El Salvador, you know, nobody from Chile would know anything about US seeking out civilians...Somebody please post a comment where you define what these two words mean: "Terrorist" and "Terrorism", none of our definitions will ever hold water, you will continue add on to the definition(I forgot the guy who said it when referring to philosophy "When a contradiction arises, create a distinction.").




Well this is why I started this rant: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7876196/

These people actually had a 90% election turnout. This one is not sarcastic: Ain't democracy grand?

The Yes-or-No Party System (and other infrastructure problems)

So voting is here again, finally our participatory democracy provides us with the extent of our participation. We poke a hole in a card or touch a button on a screen and pray to our respective deities that Katherine Harris, a house of Bush relative, and/or Scalia won't be able to not count it(Oh I'm sorry I mean not abrogate "state's rights" with a "federal chad standard", but will abrogate "state's rights" when the medicinal marijuana case comes up next season).
   If you've ever seen the movie "Waking Life", a movie that follows different actors as they give melodramatic monologues on philosophical and political issues(the cool thing about the movie is they had different artists paint on the film, and then in the final cut removed the film, so it is a cartoon of sorts, but very intricate and beautiful if you can sit through some of the more boring dialogue[reminds me of someone else hah]). One character complains that his right to self-determination is not being granted by Democracy and only having one chance every 2 years to vote for certain representatives and 4 years for the president is not enough political power to give to the people. This man soaks himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire on a streetcorner(following the example of some monks protesting China's annexing of Tibet).

Our general public seems to be losing faith in this yes-or-no system. Where is the anti-pre-emptive war candidate????  Where is the candidate who doesn't blame 9/11 on security procedures, but on the massive horizontally organized net of militant Islamic fundamentalists.     This network is the network that the United States created, funded, and trained called the Mujahadin(spelling is always different so I made up my own). The Carter and Reagan administrations started funneling money to these militant Islamic fundamentalists to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. These administrations thought they were pretty smart: just use the Muslims as cannon fodder and when the cost for the USSR is too much they'll pull out with a major defeat. It worked and the "evil empire" was halted in its' tracks.
The problem was we then ignored Afghanistan and left the entire apparatus of a network of militant Islamic extremists. These people helped secure like 70% of the country for the Taliban and became what we today call Al-Qaida(Craig Unger talks about this in his book "House of Bush, House of Saud").

Our candidates are not dealing with reality.
How can I act, as Sartre would say in "good faith", voting?

If I vote for Bush I would be advocating my own death and the death of thousands of civilians, I would be advocating a Draft, war with Iran, war with North Korea, and torture.

If I vote for Kerry then I am voting for the individual who voted for the Iraq war resolution. The candidate who will not get our troops out of this Vietnamesque hellhole immediately and another slave of soft money given by large corporations.

If I vote for Nader I am complicit in the election of Bush and basically ceding that he is the best candidate for the country. Although Nader is the only candidate who will bring up issues I feel are most important like the injustice in the justice system, pre-emptive war, soft money reform, and most importantly drive a wedge between the state and the corporation.
So who?

I already know the answer: Kerry, there is no way I can risk in any way having Bush in office again, its like asking for a bloody revolution. This man centralizing power in the executive branch and spouting his religious fundamentalist rhetoric. Guess what asshole? If there is a god he or she doesn't favor the individuals from the United States over everyone else in the world, if anything he or she is learning to dislike us from our current track record(Pre-emptive war, erosion of civil rights, torture and rape of civilians, etcetera etcetera). I can't be complicit in the continuing unilateralism. I am a US citizen, but also a citizen of the world. I'm sure if I met some guy or girl from Iraq and we had a chance to chill I think we'd get along. The last thing I'd think is we need to bomb them, occupy them, search them, degrade them, torture them, rape them, steal from their oilfields, and I heard this one jackass on Fox News saying he thought IRAQ SHOULD PAY US BACK FOR INVADING THEM!!!!!!
I will vote for sanity.
I will give Kerry and the democratic party a chance. Once they have the bully pulpit they better start speaking their minds again, forget the fact that the mainstream media has completely shifted far right after 9/11, and hopefully bring home our soldiers.
Politicians say "We need to say until the job is done."
The problem is that there is no done, all the leaders and even the Rupert Murdoch crowd can't articulate when this could possibly be done.
Remember this also: We lost Fallujah early, we will not win Fallujah in a ground war. If staying until the job is done means killing all Iraqi rebels then Fallujah will need to be completley and totally destroyed through a campaign of mass bombing which will be tantamount to genocide.
Fallujah is to Iraqi Occupation(US v. Iraq)
as
Stalingrad is to World War II(Germany v. Russia)
So if controlling Fallujah is neccesary to "be done" we will lose hundreds more young men and women. Thousands more will be wounded and our country's image and history will become a little more tarnished.

You gotta know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em


So why is a two party system bad?
The two party system is fundamentally flawed in my opinion. By only having a yes and no answer there is very little room for dissent. Without dissent, opinions are not heard, with less variety of opinions there is less scenario planning, without an abundance of feasible scenarios our policy options become EXTREMELY limited.
By only allowing two points of view we have eroded the right of self-determination.

So you whiny "Liberal"(this is what people say who are convinced all political and philosophical thought can be boiled down to a simple left-right dichotomy) how do we get outta this and why don't you go to Canada if you don't like it?"  Well you get out of this by dismantling soft money fundraising apparatus (by making it illegal to donate so much damn money from one individual or interest) to decrease the parties' power, which will simultaneously choke corruption and corporate influence out of politics. This will be the only enforcement needed in this policy, and there is already an enforcement agency that enforces these laws on Hard money, but after this it will be called what it really is.................money and the enforcement will make no exceptions for party donations
   This will give rise to Libertarian interests and social-democratic interests. Marxists and Anarchists. Neo-Nazis and Black Panthers. Poor, middle class, rich. Jingoists and Facists(these are the two ideologies overrepresented in the current regime).
This will not fragment the US, it will only strengthen by providing representation for a wider spectrum of political views.

The problem is multiparty democracies are fragile. The current multi-party democracy of Italy and the past multi-party democracy of the Weimar Republic are examples of this. It seems that in Italy the governments ends up being a coalition of allied ideologies that can gain majority acceptance. The remaining opinions end up being deemed the opposition parties. So these coalitions last for long periods of time and the opposition party grows stronger and we see a bi-partisan democracy forming again. Also we all know that happened to the Weimar republic(and if you don't, go read about it, the years after the Weimar are surprisingly similar to present day United States Foreign Policy and civil rights for Muslims).
So after empirical analysis I can't say the evidence supports the need for all voices to be represented, but does the logic outweigh the empirical analysis? Isn't it the most important thing in a Democracy to have political equality? or is the chance of a disenfranchised party system leading to an increase in Executive power to much to risk?  
So as politicians run towards the middle they lose the ability to actually lead, to cause CHANGE. This is the stagnation I feel is affecting our government today and another reason I support dismantling the current soft money system.

Three other reforms which are necessary for the continuing function of our democracy are:
-Dissolve the Senate. The "Millionaires Club" should be abolished and its duties bestowed upon the house of representatives. A unicameral legislature will run a lot smoother and be closer to the people to be held accountable for their actions. Maybe when the foreign policy is placed in the hands of the House they will enact things like CTBT or the Kyoto Protocols, because the people like clean air and surprisingly they do not want to be killed in a fiery blaze of radioactive energy, so banning testing will slow proliferation and make it obvious who the real threats are. Or this analysis is based on the fact Jessie Helms is a backwards racist who has worked dilligently to bring American foreign policy back to the habits of the early cold war.

-Dissolve the Electoral College. Jefferson disagreed with the electoral college and I agree with him. This "safeguard" is the definition of aristocratic rule, meant to check "the people's" power in case they elected someone that wouldn't be good in the eyes of the landed elite. The electors are now merely a formality, they will never change their votes if their state is won(unless state law has guidelines about sharing electoral votes). So its time to dispense with the formalities and get back to work on creating a genuine right to self-determination. No one can define an argument for the electoral college that has contemporary application, so why is it still here? I for one am not afraid of the people and their choice for president, because I am a person in that crowd of people. Its like some arrogant Americans remark "Well why has UK got a queen?". Well why the hell do we have The Electoral College?

-Voting reform. We need to have a comprehensive reform effort that goes county by county over a period of time to make sure our voting system actually works. Yes I also advocate having the United Nations oversee our elections and Iraq's(because call me crazy but I trust the UN more than Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris when it comes to electing their good friend George Jr.). I do not want the supreme court deciding my President again.

If Bush wins and continues on his path.
If Kerry wins and continues the pre-emptive war in Iraq for years.

I will be through with both of them. Bill O'Reilly is always talking about how he wants liberals on his show to learn how they developed their philosophy. If you've seen that clip from Outfoxed of him telling tons of people to shut up its hilarious. I thought about going on his show with the "Hope and Memory" copy of Adbusters with this history of US imperialism spanning a great breadth of time. Ask him about a few recent stints in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.  
How can he justify the neo-manifest destiny?
How can he feel military action is justified unless in defense of an imminent and obvious attack or to halt genocide? These are the only two reasons I believe a war should be fought and many would disagree with me on the second reason saying that is too large a window. I'll put it this way: these are the wars I would die for my country for. But we all have to remember that fighting FOR your country is not the only way to die FOR your beliefs. You can also die fighting for your country but not for your military, like in the protests in Seattle, people fought against the country's muzzling of their opinions, and died for the constitutional right to free speech(although they were truly there to voice their opposition to neo-slavery otherwise branded "free trade" for marketing purposes). They had the opportunity to listen to O'Reilly and shut up. Instead they chose to have their voices heard and celebrate the first amendment in our consitution. They took the idea of America and held it in the highest esteem by actually employing their right to free speech. The internal security force beat that right, right out of their skull along with their brains.
They died so the rest of us don't have to, we are reminded again that freedom of speech is important, but obviously it isn't good enough. If you have read about the "free speech zones" being set up at the conventions. Messing up their photo ops I guess. This era will be documented in history books. When the leaders regain their sanity and start to recall that the entire country is a "free speech zone".

 
"Count bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums
the bogeyman comin' , the bogeyman comin'
keep your head down go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums"
-A Perfect Circle

 
-Jimothy J. Jones