Politics of the Mid-Term Elections

SR, the US has been an empire 4 a long time now - the diff is that its the 1ly empire now. At any rate, nothings new, we`ll keep going- the innovators will innovate workers will produce, the thinktanks & pols will keep masturbating @ the thought of ``fresh challenges`` & we`ll get on somehow. Thanks 4 ur concerns :)

#8 SR

Ama yaar SR, you put up this long lecture to butter up and gladden the heart of the Gillster – and as is the case with all long lectures – you get carried away with your own rhetoric and start believing it. That is a dangerous state of being.

Here are the REAL facts:

(1) Having your finger in every pie – in all 170 of them, as you put it – goes with being a superpower! Hey, if one is a superpower, one must be willing to act like one! Otherwise, one must be willing to sit in the second class compartment with the rest of the hypocritical crowd!

(2) Like those proverbial men in their flying machines, polls go up and polls go down. Most mid-term elections are bad news for incumbents. GWB is remarkable for producing the unexpected during the last mid-term. For all one knows, he can still pull a rabbit out of his hat!

(3) US involvement in Iraq was a result of good intentions to (a) get rid of a bad dictator, (b) set an example for the rest of the Islamic world to follow (GWB to dear Abdul – yes darling, it IS possible to have democracy, and we are there to help!) it is too bad it has not worked in the SHORT term, due to the invasion of foreign militants – who are out there killing Iraqi civilians and destroying its infrastructure.

(4) If the USA walks away from Iraq at this point, it will be a great tragedy: (a) The current violence level will pale into insignificance compared to what would happen in an Iraq where all kinds of wild dogs are let loose on the population and (b) the cause of democracy in the Middle East would suffer a setback for the next fifty years or more.

bjkumar:

``You did not make too many predictions regarding the political outcomes?!! ``

Yes, that was not the purpose of my essay. But that shouldn`t stop you from making your own.

Thanks again SR for your second post.

Mohammad Gill

{``...The central theme of the essay was the triviality of the exploitative strategies used by both parties to score points and try to win the votes. Now John Kerry has entered the fray with his ambiguous comments regarding the war on Iraq. Every day there is a new approach for exploitation and winning the votes...``}

That isn`t all. It is far worse if you dig deeper.

As Americans face approaching the voting booths on November, they face a dismal prospect. Their own approval of Congress has now fallen to 16 percent from 20 percent in early September. The Republicans have been in control of the House of Representatives since 1994 and the Senate since 2002. But the spineless Democraps also voted en masse for the authorisation which launched the US military attack on Iraq. At that point, there was no - ``no war party`` - in the USA.

Throughout the haze of political spin and other planned distractions, one plain fact stands out, namely: The incumbents are the ones who voted for all this - from both parties. These people made the decisions which have placed the US where it is today. They are the ones in the Administration AND in Congress.

Regardless of the outcome on November 7, Bush turns into a lame duck as everybody in politics starts looking to the next election and NONE of the future candidates wants to be faced with Iraq.

The voices to get out of Iraq will get louder and drown out Mr Bush`s. Neither political party wants to end up ``owning`` Iraq. Iraq will hang like a dead bird around his neck alone.

Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union Address:
Iraq is in possession of 26,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin nerve gas, mustard gas and VX nerve agent, with 30,000 munitions to deliver same, mobile biological weapons labs, uranium from Niger, a very large nuclear weapons programs, and solid connections to al Qaeda that led directly to the attacks of September 11.

The hard facts are these: Iraq, was invaded on the pretext of having a serious program to produce nuclear weapons which are now known not to have existed since soon after UN inspections began there in 1991 (repeat - 1991).

Nearly three thousand American military personal have now been killed. More than forty thousand are known to have been wounded or injured. The Iraqi dead go beyond counting, varying from the renowned Lancet study of 655,000 to Bush`s estimate of about 30,000. The UN estimates that one out of four Iraqi children suffers from acute malnourishment.

Bush has no means to extricate himself from the position in which he has placed himself and the US. Democraps will try to shovel the responsibility for all that has gone wrong on the GOP. The Republicans will begin to desert Bush, so that he alone ends up taking the blame for the debacle in the Middle East. That would give the GOP a chance of not being torn to pieces in the 2008.

Today, the US has its armed forces inside 170 other nations, so says the Pentagon itself. Is it any wonder why the US faces so much opposition, in so many places around the world than any other nation?

In the History of the United States, one can find truly wondrous things. American real wages tripled in the years between 1850-1913, and US GDP increased over 500 percent, having an average 4.3 percent annual growth rate from 1870 to 1913. That was achieved even with the enormous real damage caused by the Civil War. Even more wondrous is the fact that it was done without any inflation of fiat paper ``money``. There was no Federal Reserve. This highly productive era was accompanied by an actual deflation of prices. From 1800 to 1913, there was a 30 percent reduction in the US Consumer Price Index from 43 to 30.6. American living standards were going up and Up and UP. In 1915, the total output of the United States exceeded that of ALL of Europe. That whole vast economic event had only taken about 45 years.

It was also the greatest feat of industrialisation ever seen. Between 1865 and 1915, more new wealth was produced by the United States than had ever existed in all of human history.

The old world of Europe reeled. Here was a near mortal challenge, not because of the new wealth that was being created inside the United States but because of the IDEAS and PRINCIPLES which made all the new wealth possible. It was these American ideas which were a mortal challenge to the old regimes all over the world. By putting these ideas into ACTION, America showed that human progress was possible and that all such achievement and happiness depended upon individual freedom and liberty. Millions of people flowed from Europe, Japan and even China and Russia to the United States simply to live free.

As Europe was back in 1870, the United States is today. And it is all alone. Back in 1870, just about every European nation called itself an Empire. Great Britain had a big one, of course, with colonies all over the world, the jewel in the crown being India. But France also had colonies and was an Empire, as was Germany. Portugal and Spain had colonies and even newly formed Italy was trying to get colonies.

These Empires are all gone. Today it is the United States which has its armed forces on the soil of Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain as well as Japan and also today inside occupied Iraq.

To Americans themselves, the costs of Empire are enormous. US real wages have not climbed since 1973, so says the US Labour Department. And with external Empire has gone internal repression - the one necessitates the other. The choice before the American people is simple: Liberty or Empire.

If the men who signed the US Constitution were wake up from their graves and look at the United States today, they would not recognise it. They would see an Empire, stronger in military terms than the British Empire they fought against, with a global reach vastly exceeding anything Great Britain ever had. They would see a Congress where laws are for sale to those who are prepared to fund the election campaigns of its members. They would see this Congress lying flat on its belly in abject submission to the powers held by the man in the White House.

Voter participation in the elections since about 1945 has been in constant decline. Many perceptive Americans have observed that it didn`t seem to matter which candidate or what party they voted for, nothing really changed. Today, that is clearly a truism. Each political party, when in power, has been ferocious in expanding the political powers it wanted. When the other party gained office, it used its period in office to expand the political powers that it wanted. The sum is that power - as such - has expanded by exponential rates over the past couple of decades. And what, at the root, is this power? It is POLITICAL power over the lives of each and every individual man, woman or child in the USA.

Inside the United States today, there is no political party standing firmly for the Constitution. There is no party standing for Individual Freedom and Liberty. There is not even a political party standing firmly for the Bill of Rights. The Republic lays dying.

Sorry for the long rant... but I feel strongly about these matters.

...SR