Tag: America

The New York Times published an editorial today entitled Looking at America that says very clearly what is at stake with the next election and how far we have to go to get back to the America we once knew:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

–snip

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked – how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

The editorial is the question many people in Europe are asking as they consider whether the “American Century” is over because of the mistakes of George W. Bush and company.  Whether they will have to look to the EU as the new world leader or whether Putin has positioned Russia to take that role, as concerning as that idea may be.

Whether those in America realise the precarious nature of their world position and their own position at home is yet to be seen and will require much reflection by the American people themselves.  But, as the NYT editorial says so well and considering all that’s at stake, it may have become a prerequisite to good citizenship.  

More below the jump…

Hello and welcome to the second installment on MMND.  Today we will do things a little differently, due to the Holiday there weren’t many stories released on Friday that would qualify for our regular approach.  Instead, headlines from various news sources across the country will be the focus.  The same basic question will apply however: when will the Corporate Media focus on these important stories?

As a reminder to news editors in Corporate Media establishments.  Well over 2/3rds of us Americans are paying attention.

IndyStar.com has some gut-wrenching statistics posted regarding child-poverty.

The number of Hoosier children living in poverty has increased by nearly 21 percent since 2000, a growth rate nearly twice that of the U.S. average for the period.

If these statistics do not cause a major upheaval in the way Indiana allocates it’s resources, there is little hope for Indiana in the future.

The guiding principles of this country came from the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. There was light and hope as the Europeans established the charters and documents declaring a new nation of freedom in this land. Of course in practice, there was the attempted destruction of the original American peoples and the importation of other peoples for labor, against their will. In over two hundred years, the nation still struggles with those injustices, even though some progress in that regard has been achieved. It still struggles with the need for cheap labor. The current masters of the capitalist machine continue to “use” labor via outsourcing and importing immigrants, where the rules of fairness and equality can be bypassed. But getting back to light and reason, they are dimming and sputtering with this dawn of a new century, this insane project for a new American century. The light is being snuffed by phobia. This twenty-first century has evolved into the full blown Age of Phobia: intense irrational fear, with all the darkness, anxiety, suspicion, paranoia, suppression, depression and misinformation that Fear with a capital F can propagate.  

According to William James, arguably one of the most insightful students of the mind, certainly since his own time, self-esteem can be represented as a fraction, with one’s pretensions in the denominator, and one’s actual successes in the numerator:

Thus, one can increase self-esteem either by increasing the numerator by increasing actual successes, or by decreasing one’s pretenses to greatness.  It was James’s claim that both self-satisfaction (high self-esteem) and self-abasement (low self-esteem) are intimately related emotional primitives.  The barometer of self-esteem could wax and wane seemingly due to various organic causes from day to day, but in non-pathological cases, it was overall subject to personal dispositions toward pretense and reality-based, objective outcomes.

Wapo: A coalition of far-left Indian communist parties have effectively killed the US-India nuclear deal, leaving Administration officials with egg all over their faces once again. But you won’t learn that reading the Post piece. FOX isn’t even running the story right now. Drudge neither.

Reuters by way of contrast, puts the facts up high: “Indian Communists Reject US Nuclear Pact”.

Why is the right-wing noise machine blacking the India-Nuke deal story out, and the Wapo burying the facts?

Because getting beating by a bunch of supposedly dead and buried communists confirms the terrible inconvenient truth: US Soft Power is melting faster than the polar ice-caps.

Gary Younge, the New York correspondent for The Guardian, has a commentary in today’s paper (15 October) about how America’s sense of optimism is gone.

It is a well-written essay and worth reading in full. I think Younge has nearly perfectly captured the general hopelessness that many Americans are feeling now about their country.

In his essay, The land of optimism is in the dumps, but refuses to accept how it got there, Younge writes:

This sense of optimism has been in retreat in almost every sense over the past few years… America, in short, is in a deep funk. Far from feeling hopeful, it appears fearful of the outside world and despondent about its own future. Not only do most believe tomorrow will be worse than today, they also feel that there is little that can be done about it.

Never Believe What They Say!

The Force Was Not With Him

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, for example, said the proposal was put together without input from Republicans.

The Hell You Say
Except there’s one little problem Johnny!

That isn’t true. Senior Republicans such as Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and a fiscal conservative, and Orrin Hatch of Utah helped draft the bill, and 18 Republicans in the Senate and 45 in the House of Representatives voted for it.

The Truth Is Out There

Declaring Torture Abhorrent in 2004

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

President Bush speaking in Panama City Panama on November 7, 2005 ‘We do not torture’
Lying straight out of your backside orifice as usual.