Bernard, If we had Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln or even Dwight Eisenhower running our government now, maybe all of this wouldn't be so bad. Eisenhower warned us about the "millitary-industrial complex" gaining power over the government and the people. Well, we didn't listen and now it has happened. Representative democracy places a responsibility on every citizen in order for it to function. Lack of quality time being spent by the majority of individual citizens in leraning about political issues and casting educated votes has created a vacuum which has been filled by thousands of lobbyists, most of them representing multinational corporations. The pharmaceutical industry alone has more lobbyists than there are members of Congress. How many lobbyists do you have? Have you given $500,000 to a political party lately?
The World Trade Center was the largest physical symbol of the multinational monetary and corporate systems. There are those who present well supported arguments that it is US corporate/government policy over the past 80 years or so that has generated so much hatred of our country from those countries which have been treated badly. Of course, the British Empire set the model for this sort of thing, and it may be no coincidence that it looks like these two countries are against the rest of the United Nations on the Iraq war issue. If our Congress was composed of statesmen instead of salesmen, they would be more worthy of trust. For every McCain or Byrd, there are dozens of corprocrats from both major parties. Throw in a history of "information abuse" against citizens by the FBI, the Nixon administration (Cheney and Rumsfeld are alumni) and our new super spy Poindexter, and you have the recipe for skepticism when it comes to the government being able to read everybody's email and all of their personal activity records without court order or probable cause. This is a very long way of saying that our government was designed to be "by the people", but is hasn't worked out that way, creating a very serious problem. I offer this as the potential defeat from within. I see the situation this way, and I hope that I am wrong. Most of the responders on this string disagree with you, and I hope that we are all wrong, and that you are right in feeling that our government can be trusted not to misuse personal information against the citizens in favor of itself or its corporate benefactors. .................. Henri, Thanks for the yogurt joke! Isn't the campaign for Prime Minister and Parliament about six weeks long? Isn't it much more information based than the US campaigns and less dependent on gigantic war chests provided by corporate donors? I think that Britian may have a more trustworthy government which is closer to the citizens than the US one. You still have a genuine culture, despite recent efforts by that former guitar player to make it a mini-USA. I think that the US is too physically large and ethnically diverse to have had a single culture, maybe up until WWII. After that, the time was ripe for common culture to develop. It would have been a multi-flavored one, and very tasty. As this was proceeding, mass media and marketing exploded on the scene, and selling and buying of products became our only common culture. We could have turned off the TV, but we didn't. Today, well, what else is there on the surface? Bush and his team markert the war against Iraq and the companion product of patirotism. They sell like hoola hoops. Andrew Card set out the strategy: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August". http://www.democrats.org/wvc/issues/200209270001.html The info-tainment channels join in, because their advertisers are getting good numbers by piggybacking their products onto the hot-selling war product. With these war products in the homes of the people, dissent can only be anti-patriotic. So, yes, I have seen a lot of rolling over lately, a lot of it in Congress and the voting booth. And a majority of eligible voters do not vote, so that proves that they are unconcerned about being either well prepared for the job or primed by negative campaign ads. David Dudine The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be November 26 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
