by Dennis Green
The Freedom House, a group that lists countries worldwide by their degree of freedom and democracy, says that among its highest standard are “Transparency and Accountability” of said governments to international standard tests. In many ways, unfortunately, our own American government cannot be given high marks.
Freedom of expression and freedom of association are especially high on the list of Freedom House’s assessments of nations, their laws and their cultures, around the world. In the new democracies, these scores are low, but also in America,. With a media and government increasingly dominated by corporate interests, the news is not good.
“Struggle against Unfair Taxes” is another criteria Freedom House uses. Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine are considered wanting on this list, where peaceful, non-violent pushback against regimes are resisted. But in the U.S., such movements are also resisted and discredited, tax strikers persecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
“Human Rights” are also high on most lists advanced by the United Nations, and also Freedom House. Yet in America, there are now a million black men in prison, all out of proportion to their percentage of the total population. We are hearing more and more immigrant bashing all the time, a thinly-disguised resentment of “those” people who don’t speak English as a first language, who may have darker skin, and whose only European blood comes from Conquistadors.
“Legality” is always given as the excuse, but where was the outrage about Vietnamese undocumented aliens, Afghani war refugees, South Koreans, Filipinos and the like? Many Jewish refugees of Soviet Pogroms also came here without the proper papers in order, but there was no outcry then either. Our border to the North is just as porous as our Southern one, and longer, but we don’t seem to worry about those illegal Canucks!
The most obvious forms of discrimination in America are in our drug laws, which prosecuted and imprison the drug crack cocaine, usually a black inner city ghetto drug, 100 times more harshly than the powdered form, more commonly used by white executive types. Despite recent reforms, the penalties for crack cocaine are still EIGHTEEN times more severe than for powdered Blow.
Many believe that the current drug prohibitions were designed in the first place, especially the marijuana laws, to discriminate against ethnic minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics, who were the primary users in the 1930s. Those laws continue to result in far higher imprisonment rates among minorities, and are not only Draconian, but about as effective as the Prohibition Against Alcohol. When will we ever learn?
There’s an old saying that the smaller the venue the more corrupt the government. Too often, public representatives are in collusion with businesses — in California especially with real estate development firms — or with public employee unions. In California, $400 billion is spent on public education, and the opportunities for incompetence and corruption abound. A lack of transparency at the local level makes it almost impossible to uncover waste and fraud.
So it’s not simply a question of whether America is a “perfect” democracy, but how far we need to stray from our democratic ideals of freedom and equality before the term cannot even be applied. If the War in Afghanistan were put to the American people in a democratic referendum, for example, would we still be there? I very seriously doubt it.
But the war makers — from the Pentagon to military manufacturers like Boeing — are in collusion with a media which doesn’t conduct a serious investigation or debate. It takes a blogger like WikiLeak to stimulate any debate at all. So a few Afghani collaborators may be killed? So what? We killed 30 innocent civilians last week alone with our drones. When we pull out, all of the collaborators will be killed, just as they were in France in 1945.
©2010 Dennis Green
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