The European solution to the post-Bretton Woods cannot be considered worse because unemployment there is higher than in America, only different. The European way is generally to preserve the most full-time jobs as is feasible (a way that does imply higher unemployment), the American (and Thatcherite) solution was to generate low paying "McJobs" and count forms of employment that were previously considered under-employment into full employment. Both systems do share the same feature that the definitions of what constititute unemployment keep getting revised to keep the numbers low. The "can't become a third world nation" is based on a simple linguistic trick and ignores the actual conditions of countries regarded respectively as "first" and "third" world nations, these names being as imaginary in themselves in the same way borders are imaginary lines.Uh... our economic situation is far better than most of Europe, which has had far higher jobless rates on average than the US (6%? There used to be a time that was considered good!). The reason for the vast descrepancy in rich v poor isn't that the poor keep getting poorer, but instead we are home to the Bill Gateses of the world. Our jobs have been going over seas since the 1800's, yet we still have enough apparently to keep our jobless rate low and employ a significant number of illegal immigrants from South of the boarder. Oh, and we can't become a third world nation, simply because first and second worlds are defined as the US and (former) USSR spheres of influence respectively, dating back to the Cold War.
As for the Patriot act... it has indeed infringed on the 14th amendment, but I haven't seen where it infringes on the 1st. Could you please site the language? DMCA, on the other hand, as well as anti-spam legislation, most certainly does. That's kinda what I'm ranting about. The Constitution isn't some antiquated relic, it is vital to ensuring the people have access to the law. I'm trying to get people stired up here to see what has been going on for the past century (You think much has really changed in three years?) and why it has to stop. Let me tell you, the legislative and executive branches are not the big threats. They have passed laws and made policy infringing on the Constitution before that have fallen by the wayside time and again. The system is built to handle those kinds of abuses. It's the judiciary that has become the cancer growing in government.
Secondly, it doesn't even matter if there were full employment. You can't pay for "Defense", the Office of Homeland Security, the "War on Drugs", the prisons, tax breaks, and other sundry public services, all at once. Something has to give, the system cannot endure. Look at the size of the deficit. This is a public time bomb.
As for the Patriot Act, there is no real need to attack freedom of speech if you attack the conditions of free speech. Such as freedom from unreasonable searches, from indefinite incarceration without trial, from having one's phoned tapped, from having one's financial or medical records searched. To say that the act applies only to terrorists is useless, since the government decides who the terrorists or potential terrorists are. In the 1960s it was an article of faith among reactionaries that the counterculture and the peace movement had the Soviet Communists as its conspirators, hence the smear campaign against Dr. King, COINTELPRO and the NSA's Operation Shamrock. And that was in a liberal period.
As for the Constitution, I may have given the false impression that the amendments are the problem. The problem is that it is simply not democratic, nor was it intended to abet a democracy. Men like Adams Hamilton, Washington, Madison (Jefferson was the wild card, which does not mean he is any kind of key for a rethinking, that's been done to death) were products of the Enlightentment who believed that democracies invariably degenerate into despotisms. They were also opposed to one-man rule, and so designed it so the Constitution would abet an oligarchy of property owners and not allow for any kind of radical changes (which is needed now for years of want of moderate change; the rate of social and technological change was much lower then) such as the abolition of slavery. The Civil War was a direct result of this constitution and the fact that the Union was a chimera of free and slave states. The House cannot be changed in a stroke. They arranged so that the President is elected secondhand, by the Electoral College. As for the Senate, 66% of the population of the US is concentrated in 12 or 13 states, which means that 33% can control 75% of the Senatorial vote, which is minority rule, the more so since the Senate is a club of billionaires. The term limit on the President produces a lame duck immediately his second term is in effect; and as for the Vice President, that poor man is expected to be the heir apparent. And the whole thing rests on first-past the post system as opposed to proportional. The US is peculiar in that in most other industrialised countries, the state takes responsibility for voter registration, in the US it is the other way round. So the problem extends across all the branches of power. The founders believed an oligarchy could guarantee liberty, this may have applied then but not now since our understanding of human rights has progressed and needs democratic backing (indeed universal adult suffrage is one of those rights). Democracy means "rule of the people", not "choosing between a Coke candidate and a Pepsi candidate and giving him obscene power", and there is no way now to instantiate that principle, and what's worse, if we add the the numbers of the citizens who didn't vote to the votes for Gore, Nader etc. we must come to the conclusion that most of the people didn't want Bush in the first place (to say that an abstainer did not object to Bush by his abstention is a contradiction in terms), which is not enough a quantity of the people to be considered any kind of rule.
The legislative branch is of course, spineless, but that means they are useless in checking the executive, which appoints the judicial. The CIA is itself an infringement, since it is in practice not "checkable" by the legislative branch, with "national security" as a pretext. And the CIA has by no means fallen by the wayside, it's been here for 50 plus years, segragation lasted even longer, and the legislative and executive branches didn't move a finger against that until the fall of Nazi Germany made it inevitable. So none of these trends are the product of the last three years, the problem has been here for years, and is only now coming to fruition. The US has a government that is in fatal contradiction to the interests of its citizens, and has now adopted a policy of staying on top by means of aggressive war., and is run by a ideological mediocrity. All of this is justified by an ideology which is accepted by most citizens. The cancer is not a government but an entire ossified system, the whole country top to bottom, in institutions as well as in belief, and accepted by the people in general except for a few heretics. It cannot bend under pressure but can break, and the process has started. To not try for a different conception, a new institutions that will make democracy and freedom real under these circumstances is as romantic as a Roman to believe in the restoration of the pre-Augustan constitution, and only permits evasion of the basic issues regarding where the power really lies and what the public good consists of.
One final note.
GoldenGundam wrote:
Well, what is Iraq? "Temporarily occupied" doesn't cut it since Iraq has a certain natural resource, and there is no real difference to the Iraqis, as for most third worlders, in such distinctions. They know full well what the content of a "friendly" government, as Washington terms it, is, as sure as the Central Americans do. The entire modern definition owes its origin to a rationalization; since the US used to be subject to Britain, it knows firsthand that empires are wrong, so it avoids the form and preserves the content, and keeps the definition restricted to what other countries did/are doing/want to do. Just like the USSR never had any satellites, just "fraternal republics", and the Inquistion tortured anyone, they just "handed people over to the secular arm", and other such manifestations of Newspeak.[/i]It sure seems something like it. But we are not an empire because we don't have colonies and the such, just military bases and several commonwealths(or something like that).
