Eschewal of Responsibility and Accountability

[Moses]

Isn't the Bush Administration behavior exactly that of a psychopathic sociopath?

Krugman discusses their unprincipled absolutism, and their evasion of responsibility and accountability:

www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/opinion/19KRUG.html?hp

Published: March 19, 2004

Excerpts:

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." - George Bush declared on Sept. 20, 2001. - Surely he didn't mean that everyone was obliged to support all of his policies, that if you opposed him on anything you were aiding terrorists. Now we know that he meant just that.

President Bush, who had a global mandate to pursue the terrorists responsible for 9/11, went after someone else instead.

The Republicans turn on the Spanish people:

By voting for a new government, in other words, the Spaniards were enforcing the accountability that is the essence of democracy. But in the world according to Mr. Bush's supporters, anyone who demands accountability is on the side of the evildoers. According to Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, the Spanish people "had a huge terrorist attack within their country and they chose to change their government and to, in a sense, appease terrorists." So there you have it. A country's ruling party leads the nation into a war fought on false pretenses, fails to protect the nation from terrorists and engages in a cover-up when a terrorist attack does occur. But its electoral defeat isn't democracy at work; it's a victory for the terrorists.

Bad foreign policy for domestic political purposes:

For these denunciations of Spain, while counterproductive when viewed as foreign policy, serve a crucial domestic purpose: they help re-establish the political climate the Bush administration prefers, in which anyone who opposes any administration policy can be accused of undermining the fight against terrorism.


....in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to "support the troops" a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that's the way he wants it.


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[calabi-yau]

The Bush administration can eschew responsibility and accountability for their actions abroad only because they mirror a majority of their constituents.
Contrary to Spaniards, a majority of Americans have supported the war and still do. Spaniards have not gone in search of world sympathy when terrorism hit but instead used their democratic right to push out those who did not reflect their opinions on what is best for them and their country.

Americans in large part will not care one iota about the rest of the world until they learn to view themselves as an integral part of it. In an interconnected world, both isolationism and ignorance are bound to bring unexpected and less than joyful experiences for those who are blind to reality.

If Americans ever lose their power to control the world's ressources, they will turn against each other and pillage what they have left in their own backyard.

Nothing less than an American Cultural Revolution will change the current course of events. Accountability and responsibility comes with maturity. Unfortunately, America has not yet showed it had reached that level of 'sophistication'.

Greedy children playing with guns is bound to get someone hurt.

[Ropegun]

It's not only that it's the rest of the world they don't understand, it's their own neighborhood. People in amerika have gotten to the point where they don't know who lives next door to them.

Amerikans don't understand anything much past their job, their bills, their kids, and immediate stuff. Past that, most people here just don't care. If you told them something happened to the next door neighbor, 5 minutes later they'd have forgotten.

But I contend that this is the way that the corporate government wants people to be. As along as people spend the money to keep the core familial group happy, and as long as the idea that what you own makes you happy continues, the corporate owned government gets it's wish.

I believe, in my limited political knowledge, that if you can crack into the mainstream media somehow, and get your message in front of a large audience for an extended period of time, you can at least get people to at least question why things are. Information is king.

But as long as people put up with advertising as entertainment, nothing will change here.

[Ropegun]

Maybe my last post was a bit off topic. What I meant to say with all of that is that its the responsibility of the amerikan people to hold elected officials accountable.
This is done by turning off the TV and learning something. But this is a hard thing when you're brainwashed into being concerned about the advertisements during the stuporbowl, and the like.

But i do feel it's brainwashing. When Jesse Ventura and Arnold Are elected into public office, it goes to show the influence of media manipulation in our country. And we as a nation accept this as being ok.

We are the ones who have to make change in amerika. The elected are their to work for us. I think they have forgotten that due to our letting them forget.

Anyway, you all get my point.

Peace.

[calabi-yau]

Your response was not off topic at all, Ropegun.
Sad to say but in a democracy (no matter how twisted it may have become), the people usually get the government they deserve.

It is not just America that's heading the "wrong" way. So is Canada and western civilization as a whole. This may be a reason why so many foreigners who do not like where it's presently heading for are taking such a keen interest in what's happening in the US. You are not alone (gawd, now I sound like an alien... )

Our main problem is that we are quickly losing a sense of COMMUNITY. To believe we are truly independant from others is the greatest lie ever crammed down our throat by this consumer society we now live in. The nuclear family sitting around the TV and expecting instant gratification destroys any sense of accountability and responsibility we have towards the communities we live in and DEPEND on to survive.

Believe me, Canadians, French, Germans etc... have not yet taken it as far as Americans, but we are getting there and you have nothing much to envy us for.

[Ropegun]

Ok, so we agree that lack of community is a big issue here.

The major question that i have always had is what to do about it. We all know plenty of things that need fixing. My proposition is for us to think about real ways of fixing those problems.

A few items I'd like to discuss......

Corporate control of media.
Corporate control of elections.
Fairness and transparency of said elections, and those that run them.
Transparency and accountability of public officials.
Campaign finances, and the effect of corporate donorship on elections.
Lobbies and outside influence on policy.
Two party politics, to the exclusion of others.

I could name several other areas I'd like to see changed in our system, but this list is a start.
I hope everyone can gather around the table and talk about this stuff. Please feel free to chime in anytime folks.

Any ideas???

[Ropegun]

I guess POA addressed these issues in his new constitution thread. And a hell of a job he did too!


Peace.

[calabi-yau]

Ropegun said:

Any ideas???

Get to the corporations first.
Ban their contributions to political parties to start with.

"Special interests" in elections should ONLY be a voters'
prerogative.

Corporations don't vote, people do. Corporations do not hold office, people do.

Banning corporate contributions to political parties would force candidates to address citizens issues. Also, allow for a limit on any individual contribution to a political party. Millionaires just as the average joe blow would be able contribute at the SAME LEVEL. Again, all votes should be treated equally throughout the entire electoral process.

This type of electoral process already exists elsewhere.

[POA]

calabi-yau said:

Your response was not off topic at all, Ropegun.
Sad to say but in a democracy (no matter how twisted it may have become), the people usually get the government they deserve.

It is not just America that's heading the "wrong" way. So is Canada and western civilization as a whole. This may be a reason why so many foreigners who do not like where it's presently heading for are taking such a keen interest in what's happening in the US. You are not alone (gawd, now I sound like an alien... :o)

Our main problem is that we are quickly losing a sense of COMMUNITY. To believe we are truly independant from others is the greatest lie ever crammed down our throat by this consumer society we now live in. The nuclear family sitting around the TV and expecting instant gratification destroys any sense of accountability and responsibility we have towards the communities we live in and DEPEND on to survive.

Believe me, Canadians, French, Germans etc... have not yet taken it as far as Americans, but we are getting there and you have nothing much to envy us for.

Here are some of the reasons why I think a sense of community has been lost in the United States:

Ambition. Americans are encouraged through the popular culture but also the economic system (which aren't separable, of course) to be hypercompetitive. This is worsened by the fact that in the dualistic logic of "1 winner v. 1 (or all else) losers", there is no status, no acceptance, of someone who has lost so everything that takes place, where it's for social status or economic status or ethnic status, is quite literally a life-or-death matter.

Specialization. America seems to have the most specialized economic system I can concieve of (or at least, it used to before outsourcing became dominant. Now, we may very well have to face having no economic system whatsoever). This is because specialization creates an increasing number of middlemen, which then results in increasing profit for all of them.

The catch is that with increasing specialization, comes the loss of ability to communicate between people of the different specializations, to the point where nobody really has any sense of how any two aspects of society might be linked. Where this is particularly dangerous is when 'expert knowledge' is supposed to replace the kind of decisionmaking that individual citizens ought to be making (ie, pollsters and advertisers decide political priorities, ideologues decide foreign policy without consulting any actual history, et cetera).

Additionally, when a specialization disappears, a lot of people are left without any sense of social or economic continuity.

Deliberate fostering of mistrust. I'm sure this is a problem everywhere, but in the United States, there always seems to be a heavy degree of infiltration in any cause that might have a shred of hope of bringing about improvement. The result is that everyone thinks that everyone else possibly could be spying on them. (Of course, especially now, that's particularly not without cause, but it's never a good thing).

(I'll add additional factors as I think of them. Can anyone think of any others?)

[POA]

calabi-yau said:

Get to the corporations first.
Ban their contributions to political parties to start with.

"Special interests" in elections should ONLY be a voters'
prerogative.

Corporations don't vote, people do. Corporations do not hold office, people do.

Banning corporate contributions to political parties would force candidates to address citizens issues. Also, allow for a limit on any individual contribution to a political party. Millionaires just as the average joe blow would be able contribute at the SAME LEVEL. Again, all votes should be treated equally throughout the entire electoral process.

This type of electoral process already exists elsewhere.

Agreed.

I set the limit to contributions at $200 in the Constitution I posted to an individual politician. That's low enough so a significant portion of the American population could actually donate.

(I don't think I included a donation level to political parties, though, so I'll fix that loophole in the next revision. Thanks for pointing that out.)

As far as eliminating corporate contributions, an argument that may convince more Americans would be if all organizational contributions (from corporations, but also from PACs and unions) were eliminated. Otherwise (knowing this from arguing the point on message boards elsewhere), the counterargument will be raised that you are trying to create an unfair advantage for union donations.

As a general point, there really is no honest motive for any organization to give money to a politician even if you think that individual donations from persons should be allowed. Essentially, what this consists of is 'double-donating' where an individual gives once, and then gives again through the auspice of a front.

[Moses]

Wow. Good point.

Are corporations, as persons, in the legal history? citizens? If so, shouldn't they have the same limits on their conduct?