Commentary
American values
By Nick Egnatz
Online Journal Guest Writer


May 29, 2009, 00:22

Our forefathers fought a revolution against Britain based on the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal.” However as soon as the fighting was over, the “Founding Fathers” wrote the Constitution and excluded slaves, Native Americans and the vast majority of whites who were not wealthy landowners from either voting or holding office.

While over the years the voting franchise has become more inclusive, elite control of our county is complete, facilitated by corporate media and two political parties beholden to our moneyed interests and historic American values.

For more than two centuries we enslaved Africans. Even with the heroic efforts of the Abolition Movement, it still took a Civil War to end this injustice.

When the white man first arrived at the shores of the New World, he was by and large received with hospitality. We repaid it with genocide against the First Americans, as our forefathers broke every treaty ever signed to steal their land for our new ‘democracy.’

Not content to wreak havoc upon Native Americans and the Africans brought to our shores, our forefathers engaged in wars of aggression against Spain, Mexico and the Philippines to implement our ‘manifest destiny’ of an empire from sea to shining sea and then some. More recently we have fought wars of aggression in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. We have seen our CIA orchestrate and support military coups across the globe in Nicaragua, Chile, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, etc.

Since the mid 1970s, we have seen an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies (AID, NED, CFD, CIPE, IFES, ODI, etc) ‘promote democracy’ abroad. Turning the English language on its head, they have done this by stifling and thwarting popular movements representing the people and supporting local elite rule that does the bidding of transnational capital at the expense of their people.

While the U.S. record on torture is pretty good when engaged with white European nations, the same cannot be said when engaged with the rest of humanity.

Economically, unregulated capitalism has performed its natural function to create progressive inequality. Coupled with the globalization creed of the neoliberals, our own unregulated capitalism has ruined almost every economy across the globe. The fledgling American middle class that sprang up after WWII as the result of a few minor adjustments to capitalism, is well on its way to extinction as both political parties dance to Capital’s tune and the people are unrepresented.

Corporate control of the media has left Americans uninformed and as a whole unequipped to rebel against elite corporate rule. Senator Richard Durbin recently made this candid statement about the Wall Street banks’ relationship to Congress, “They frankly own the place.” He could have also included the so-called ‘defense’ industry, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies.

Elite rule, corporate controlled media, slavery, genocide, torture, wars of aggression and progressive inequality this is our history and these are our American values. When our current president refers to American values with his own soaring rhetoric, he ignores the reality of U.S. Empire. Real change of these American values will leave both our country and world a better place.