Failing America

Mods: seems borderline I/P, but my judgement was it was not,
feel free to move if you think you must.

Have the American people capitulated to the manufactured
fear fabricated by Bush, Ashcroft and Ridge? Are we the sheep
Churchill mocked when he said, "Sheep don't need whipping"?
Do we sit passively in front of our television sets listening
to lie after lie and do nothing, knowing now that these lies
sent American boys abroad as administration aggressors, yea,
as unprovoked invaders of a foreign land, as occupiers entrusted
with securing the natural resources of that land to be used to
pay for the reconstruction caused by the invasion? Had we known
the truth would we have agreed to be the mercenaries of the Cabal,
to secure for them the millions they will accrue from contracts
paid for by our tax dollars while we suffer the indignity of
being labeled across the globe, "foot soldiers of the corporate
elite"? Has the "dumbing down" of America, that
has turned our Democracy into a "Corpocrisy," turned
us as well into corporate robots to be used at will by those
who buy our politicians?

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Last March I spent time in Prague visiting
the Jewish ghetto there. Walls surround much of that ghetto even
today, walls constructed by the authorities when the Catholic
Church through an edict of the Third Lateran Council decided
in 1179 that Catholics should not come in contact with Jews who
had resided in Prague since the 10th century, something like
the situation in Palestine where the indigenous population (say
Palestinians), lived since the 4th century CE. That edict resulted
in the "ghettoizing" of the district, forcing 7,000
Jews to be packed into a network of putrid, squalid alleys where
personal indignity rotted beneath the wall that separated those
in power from those imprisoned. Now we have a government that
acts in our name, like the Lateran Council deciding for Medieval
Catholics whom they shall meet with and whom they shall spurn,
as it allows and provides the money to a sordid regime in Israel
to wall-in a population in their own land even as that regime
defies the world community by refusing to give back the land
to the indigenous people to whom it rightfully belongs. America's
absolute support for the Sharon government, despite the terrorism
it levels at the Palestinians, and its obvious belittlement of
the PLO, mocks the roadmap it proffers as a solution to the crisis.
How can a people so treated construct an "Israeli wall of
humiliation"? How can an American support a President who
acquiesces to such degradation of a people?

Condoleezza Rice called the creation
of a democratic government in Iraq "the moral mission of
our time." Yet she speaks as an advisor to a government
that manufactures policy out of politics, fabricates evidence
from lies, conjures reason from duplicitous acts, extols freedom
of speech as it maligns dissenters, lauds democracy as it illegally
occupies a sovereign state, decries terrorism as it supports
the most savage terrorist regime in the world, and she has the
gall to overlook the need to create a democratic government in
America! This regime, this Bush regime, has failed the American
people. It is time we give our consent to those who govern us.
Sitting passively is no longer an option.

CounterPunch