Frequently politics in America divides along a line that believes that all government is bad and that anything government does is good.
As a New Yorker article pointed out,
this can mean, for example, that Republicans oppose anything
that might make government look good. Amtrak rail improvements is cited.
On the other hand, local government, deprived of the ability
to raise taxes, rip off their people with rapacious parking fees and tickets,
ridiculous prosecutions and a complicated structure made extremely difficult to
navigate.
The ultimate victims are the people with the least amount of
money to pay the fees.
British television can serve as the usual guide to who gets
the shaft. J.K. Rowling’s book, “The Casual Vacancy,” has been made into an HBO
mini-series.
The town council is led by people who want to keep the poor
out of town. The poor not only will not be heard, they will not be seen.
This caricature of argument makes reasonable debate
impossible. You are either with a party and its ideology or against it.
Thus a city like Denver can make people pay several thousand
dollars in lawyer fees if they should accidentally wound themselves with a gun
as they put it in a safe.
Doesn’t the NRA control the government?
Who benefits? The lawyers _ our ultimate oligarchs – laugh
all the way to the bank. And the NRA is able to raise more money because of the
perceived threat to gun owners.
Who benefits? The lawyers _ our ultimate oligarchs – laugh
all the way to the bank.
It ties up our legal system, and takes the little money the
middle class has left away. Police now are promising nationwide to prevent the
country from being destroyed by the plague of edible marijuana. It even merited
a story in the New York Times. The point is to keep the “Drug War” going and
more jobs for the boys. This makes unions, on their worst day, look benevolent.
Why has the U.S. Supreme Court dragged its feet on
legalizing gay marriage? It is not all ideology. Much of it is incompetence.
The “whack-a-mole” strategy that President Obama inherited
from former President George Bush waters the growth of terrorism.
In Andrew Cockburn’s “The Kill Chain” it is shown that when
“high value” targets were eliminated attacks on Americans increased. The same
counterproductive result occurs in the drug wars. Kill a drug leader and it
leaves a vacuum making it cheaper for producers who aren’t forced to pay the
kingpin.
Instead of considering the possibility that this strategy is
doomed to failure, Cockburn writes that the military compares it to mowing the
grass. Of course it grows again.
And the jobs continue, and contracts become more valuable to
defense contractors.
The U.S. gets into a “social media” war, bidding for “hearts
and minds.”
Both ISIS and the U.S. government make claim after claim of
victory. The concept of silently eliminating an opponent, or launching a
terrorist raid without admitting it, is no long a strategy on the table.
For the West, often it appears that the only “hearts and
minds” hearing Washington’s argument are Americans already convinced “the
militants” should be eliminated. The array of opponents has become as broad as
the Republican presidential candidate field. That is why many now call them
“militants,” instead of terrorists, because it is not really known what they
want. And in some cases, no one tries to find out.
Whether you question a “Bush” or Obama you are considered an
enemy by their camps. You must agree on everything or go elsewhere, or just be
ignored.
It sometimes seems like the tribalism so often deemed
corrupt in the Third World.
No comments:
Post a Comment