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.