America's Path of Ignoble Ignominy
By Dave Lefcourt article link
August 24, 2010 | OpEdNews
If one is a true patriot of this country, he (she) should be appalled at our government's policies i.e. the preemptive and unnecessary wars, the drone attacks and the killing of innocents, our resort to torture, the extraordinary rendition and detention of suspects without charges, the warrantless wiretapping to name a few of the more despicable acts we have descended to use.
That our government has sided with the mega banks, the corporate behemoths and the richest 1% over the working man and woman should make one boil with contempt for its government's betrayal of the majority of the American people.
We have been propagandized and used, many infantilized by insidious advertizing and marketing, treated as fodder and unthinking fools by the charlatans in corporate board rooms as well as the sycophants in elected office that they bankroll and are beholden to do their bidding.
Every two years and every four years we trudge to the polls to elect the same "palookas" or someone else, different only in person, while getting the same awful results.
Instead of storming the "Bastille" and overthrowing the knaves in power who perpetrated and perpetuate our present plight, we've become passive and obedient, trudging to work (if we still have a job), scraping to pay the bills and make ends meet, resisting foreclosure and bankruptcy, seemingly resigned to accepting the plight before us, too tired and beaten down, too bereft of energy, the life in us all but gone.
If there's anything to be heard it comes from the screeching megaphone of the far right tea bagger nativist, propagandized by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck and the idiot Palin revving the raucous crowds with aspersions of Islamaphobia, Obama is a Muslim and is not native born, yelling and screaming to kill government instead of demanding it do the job correctly and effectively to the benefit of the people.
But from the rest we get a collective yawn, too scared to risk losing the meager pittance they've managed to hold on to.
What must happen for us to be so shaken and demand we won't take it anymore?
If the worst recession since the great depression didn't do it, what will? The Treasury has been raided and looted to make the banking bandits whole again, knowing as they do that the next financial crisis and economic calamity they perpetrate the government will come to the rescue, even as they sing and tout the virtues of unfettered capitalism while being beggars feeding at the social welfare tit of taxpayer money.
Why haven't there been massive demonstrations on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the Congress and the White House?
It is both saddening and harrowing to witness our slow but seemingly inexorable decline from being a beacon of light in the world to becoming the arrogant bully full of imperial hubris using terrorism and terrorists as the new enemy (replacing defunct Communism) the new menace we must fight to the death in our endless and unnecessary wars.
It can no longer be "My country right or wrong", not when our republic has become an imperialistic hegemonic tyrant, doing more to destabilize the world (while in the name of bringing freedom and democracy) than any terrorist Osama bin Laden could possibly even imagine, never mind actually do.
Only the American people can rescue ourselves, reclaim our government and our country from the ruinous, ignoble and ignominious path we have been traveling. Let's hope it isn't too late.
Dave Lefcourt is retired, and the author of "Deceit and Excess in America: How Moneyed Interests Have Stolen America And How We Can Get It Back", Authorhouse, 2009. His email address is dglefc22733@aol.com.
About the Book:
“Deception is eating out soul. It corrupts and debases us. Whatever moral good we have stood for has been eroded by this disease. Its legacy is our resort to torture in our misapplied “war on terrorism”, exhumed out of the ruins of 9/11…
Our economic and financial meltdown is a direct result of excesses and wild speculation by Wall Street … the tentacles of deceit reach into our institutions, both public and private. We have government by deception, deception in business … even war by deception.
We are a people that have been propagandized by those interests that control the reins of power.
America was not always this way.
There have always been moneyed interests in this country who exploited and used their means … and by virtue of that wealth, they always have had influence on the government, but they did not control all the reins of power as they do today.
America has been usurped by the moneyed interests whose power is derived from the influence that money bestows upon them.
It is all of one piece, not formally connected, but intertwined with tentacles that reach everywhere in a headlong pursuit to acquire as much money and power through the use of any methods and schemes, whether it is done ruthlessly or through public relations, … marketed through high powered lobbying or simple direct corruption, with no concern for any principle other than the pursuits of money and power, and the public interests be damned in the process.
We must embrace the idea of our elected officials being accountable to the people. The Constitution of the United States starts with, “We the people”… not the President, not the Congress, not the Supreme Court, but, “We the people.” As Franklin warned, “… a Republic, if we can keep it.”
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