Abstract

© Dr M D Magee (from AskWhy Blogger), Contents Updated: Sunday, 5 June 2011

US Popular Opinion

America has a great analyst of their political situation in Noam Chomsky, yet Americans are so indoctrinated by their Brahmin class of plutocrats that they take no notice of what he has to say, which is a lot, it is blunt, easy to comprehend and it is true. US politicians harp on about their uniquely brilliant democracy, but while most Americans will parrot what is said out of misguided patriotism, they just do not believe it. They do not believe they create their own institutions or run their own country. Pollsters find 80% of them think the government is controlled by a few big interests looking out for themselves and not for the people. Popular opinion is that less than 20% think much of Congress, yet voters re-elect most Senators and Representatives, though they have no real choice and play no real part in running the country.

In a true democracy, people would feel they are shaping their own lives, and would therefore, Chomsky says, be celebrating 15 April, the day when taxes are paid. It was the day when the financial flesh was put on the democratically chosen skeleton, when people publicly put their money where their democratic mouth is, to implement policies they had chosen. It is nothing like that. It is a day people resent because they are obliged to pay their hard earned tax dollars to maintain policies and programs they mostly find useless at best and objectionable at worst. They do not feel they have any stake in government, and none in leading corporations banked up by government. Voters have little regard for most institutions, little say in what they decide, and little enthusiasm for having to finance it.

Political issues hardly bear on electoral campaigns, and many electors, maybe most, are not even sure what the issues are. How then is democracy possible? US Elections are run by the PR industry and so are effectively bought by the parties and candidates with the deepest pockets. The Obama campaign was no different, as the annual award by the advertising industry for the “best marketing of the year” shows. It went to Obama’s campaign which beat Apple! Advertisers work on mood not meaning, and it works! Obama had little definite to say about the issues, but concentrated on the warm feeling words “hope” and “change”. When people vote for such objectively meaningless slogans, it shows that hope and change are what they do not have. It should tell the politicians that people felt hopeless, and did not like what they had, and that ought to be a warning. It shows that society is crumbling at its foundations.

US Christian Party Robs the Poor to Save the Rich

The Great Society of capitalism and scourge of socialism, the USA Republican government, suddenly found itself nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy! It was handing out trillions of dollars to the backers of the Republican party, the USA treasury itself being backed by trillions of dollars from Communist China. Is the US elector likely to get a tad suspicious that they have been taken for a ride for decades? It is not a bit likely. People like Bachmann and Palin are still taken seriously by the US electorate, who seem immune to economic sense as well as common sense. Both boast they believe in Genesis, an account of the creation of the world written in Syria almost 3000 years ago. With leaders like that, can anyone be surprised when the Republican administration demonstrates that it knows only how to bail out crooked billionaires?

Michael Hudson, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and of The Myth of Aid, wrote online at Global Researcher that economic theory used to explain that profits and interest were a return for calculated risk. The new Republican economics is based on “computerized gambling on the direction of interest rates, foreign currencies and stock prices”. Except that no gambling is involved because, when gigantic losses on bad bets have to be paid, the Republican administration suddenly finds bottomless coffers of dollars as bailouts to the gamblers—many of them Republican campaign contributors!

On Friday, 19 September 2008, the White House promised an alleged $700 billion, in addition to the trillions of dollars—a doubling of America’s national debt—already committed on 7 f that September in the nationalization of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, “to support junk mortgages fraudulently issued beyond the ability of debtors to pay, and above the market price of the collateral pledged”. Yet Bush spoke as if the Martians had landed, not that his best pals had suddenly realized they had lost their mortgage repayments in the local Christian owned casino:

We must act now to protect our nation’s economic health from serious risk… There will be ample opportunity to debate the origins of this problem. Now is the time to solve it… In our nation’s history there have been moments that require us to come together across party lines to address major challenges. This is such a moment.

The Republicans did not want anyone, Republican or Democrat, to think about the origins of the problem before Congress has committed the bailout money. “There is no time to make the biggest bailout in election history an election issue”—well, not immediately before the presidential election. Secretary to the Treasury, Paulson, echoed more of the same half-witted propaganda, the very guff that the US electorate can be relied upon to soak up:

Our economic health requires that we work together for prompt, bipartisan action.

Paulson-Bernanke Plan

The Paulson-Bernanke plan would underwrite the banks selling off the homes of five million home mortgage debtors faced with default or foreclosure. The fraudsters in the finance corporations lost nothing, but the poor who were sold unrealistic mortgages lost everything. The Federal Reserve just let the lending agencies refinance the junk mortgages by effectively writing off the difference between the mortgage and the collateral property. Then the gambling swings and roundabouts could continue for awhile, Republicans hoped to get campaign gratitude money, and, with a bit of temporary electoral relief and gullibility, they thought they might even win the Presidential race.

The Republicans treated the handout of free public money just as they treated the lead up to the Iraq war, with myths, lies and desperate urgency thrown in to panic a quick and ill-thought out decision, and the same people that “warned” the country about weapons of mass destruction were behind the operation. The solution had little relation to the underlying cause of the problem, what Warren Buffett called “weapons of mass financial destruction”.

Bernanke retained his high position into the Democratic administration, the party for smewhat less lunatic but just as gullible voters.

Irresponsible, or fraudulent companies had paid out revenue to their financial managers, insiders, stockholders and political candidates on committees deciding the nation’s financial regulation, instead of putting it in reserves. Now, they were being rewarded for their enterprise, either from the Freddies, Fannies and AIGs, or from their Federal Treasury—ok! From the Treasury!

Why should these gamblers be bailed out, if they have enough to lose without having to become public wards by going on welfare? Hedge fund trading was limited to the very rich, to investment banks and other institutional investors. But it became one of the easiest ways to make money, loaning funds at interest for people to pay out of their computer-driven cross-trades. And almost as fast as it is made, this revenue is paid out in commissions, salaries and annual bonuses.

The recipients of these speculative profits do not even have to pay normal income tax on it. Speculating with other people’s money should not even be legal, but at least speculative profits should be taxed at a higher rate than legitimate profits. These profits are tagged as “capital gains”, and the tax rate is therefore much more favourable. “Myths” are needed to explain why it is in the public interest to bail out these gamblers:

Good rhetoric is needed to explain why the government should let them go into a casino and let them keep all their winnings while using public funds to make good on the losses of their counterparties.

Hudson says the US Treasury and Federal Reserve have changed American capitalism overnight and irreversibly—“if they can get away with it”. The class FDR called “banksters” have orchestrated a coup d’Etat. It is:

the largest and most inequitable transfer of wealth since the land giveaways to the railroad barons during the Civil War era.

So what do the Christian Right have to say about all this? Presumably nothing, because their God, made in their own image, is just as crooked as the campaign financiers of their God-sent party. Christians always beef about personal pecadillos they do not approve of, but they never have anything to say about serious crime. They must approve of that!

Comment from Sam

What about the indians? If anything shows the political power of religious beliefs it is that betrayal of a fellow human by religious men out to get theirs while the getting was good, justifying it by a set of ancient principles that the Persian magicians established. Their magic is at work even today.

The Reality of Capitalism

No feeling of hope exists in these depressed days, but the Great Depression was different. In the depths of despair people did not lose hope, they always felt there was a way through, things would come good. Admittedly, it took a world war and many deaths before brighter days came after the Second World War when the Brahmin business classes of the US built an incredible, yet unremarked propaganda campaign to eliminate all ideas of proper democracy, and social feeling while promoting social Darwinism, the false belief that survival of the fittest should be the norm of civilized communities, that selfishness was the essence of humanity as it was supposed to be in Nature. Capitalism was driven by greed and selfishness, and those who could not stand it went to the wall, or rather had a pauper’s funeral… and that was supposed, under the “Darwinian” capitalist ideology, to have been what society was all about.

Yet what did this capitalism actually do? It was a production and marketing strategy, not a creative one, except perhaps in PR and labor productivity. Where did technological innovations like computers and the internet come from? Overwhelmingly from research institutions like universities, mainly funded by the Pentagon. In other words, the principle fount of new products was a dynamic and creative public sector of the economy. Capitalism was not where technological novelties came from. It simply manufactured and distributed them for personal profit after communal endeavors had invented them. Inventions like computers and the internet were in use for decades before private enterprise made use of them for profit. Most of the economy is the same still. So, where is the capitalism that is so much vaunted and praised by the propaganda machine? It does not exist. What exists is this:

1. the public pays the costs
2. the public takes the risks
3. the plutocrats in the private sector take the profits.

The reality of capitalism can no longer be hidden after the collapse and bail out of the banks in the last two years. Saving inept and greedy banks is justified by the “too big to fail” slogan of our cringingly servile governments, who now are exposed as the paid monkeys of the profiteers, none more obviously than Tony Blair. Every attempt since Adam Smith to live purely by supposedly self regulating, free market principles has led to disaster.

If the banks have to be bailed out because they are “too big to fail”, they are being treated as public utilities, except that the profit goes to the Brahmin caste, the bankers’ own class. In the UK, the government has had to take a dominant share in some banks, yet has been timid in acting, as a dominant shareholder should, to protect its investment from being siphoned off into private coffers, like some tinpot dictatorship supported by the US, contrary to the will of the local people. That is the democracy exported by America. Whatever is essential in a state must be publicly owned so that the state can make sure it does not fail, but the public get any profits and all of the benefits they produce. That is what a public utility is for.

Is Your Incentive a Fat Bonus or Threat of the Sack?

When industrial changes causing hardships to some workers happen unexpectedly and without the government preparing for retraining, the workers remain conservative about their trades, and dislike innovations, new processes and new methods. When such changes are in the permanent interest of the community, they ought to be carried out without allowing unmerited loss to laborers whose old fashioned work is no longer wanted.

Why should, say, a coal miner suffer when the pits become uneconomic, or coal usage has to be curtailed because of climate change? He has not committed any crime, and the closures are entirely outside his control. Instead of being allowed to starve or suffer humiliating poverty, he must be paid to retrain, be given instruction in whatever other trade is within his grasp and is in demand. Everyone ought to have sufficient pay to ensure a livelihood, whether or not the work they are skilled in is wanted at the moment or not. If it is not wanted, some new trade which is wanted should be taught at the public expense. Is that socialist planning? It is capitalist planning because capitalism depends on public spending. Poverty restricts spending, and suppliers fall on to short time, and bankruptcy. It makes sense to ensure a minimal spending level, even when people are unemployed. Welfare is not a dead loss. It lubricates the economy.

Natural human conservatism tends to hold back progress. But most workers are interested mainly in security, security of employment and security of income. Workers determined to stick with dead end jobs are few and far between—a newspaper editors fantasy. People protect dead end jobs only because they know no, or inadequate, provision has been made for them when the obsolete factories close.

The tyranny of the employer, which robs most people of liberty and initiative, is unavoidable so long as the employer retains the right of dismissal and loss of livelihood. It is a right supposed to be essential for anyone to have an incentive to work properly, but, by some curiosity of human nature bankers and corporate bosses, people supposed to be highly motivated, actually need the opposite incentive—vast bonuses and “golden hellos”—to entice them to work. It needs no massive study to realize that this dichotomy of human nature is nonsense. It is the mentality of the slave master over the slave, propagagated largely by overly rich newspaper editors.

Bertrand Russell said as we get more civilized, incentives based on hope become preferable to those based on fear. Everyone, not just bankers, should be rewarded for working well rather than the right wing dogma of punishment for working badly. The banking instance of it is simply a scam—a way of robbing us all by dubious methods—but the system has always worked properly in the civil service, where anyone is only dismissed for some exceptional degree of vice or virtue, such as murder, or refusal to participate in immoral governments plans.

The civil service is always the first target of reactionary newspaper barons, but they are mainly exemplary workers. New Labour has done its best to destroy the civil service even at the highest level. To restore civil servants’ confidence and the esteem we had in them is another essential of any government that is to replace the odious one of the last decade or so.

Surveillance State or Oppressive State

John Kampfner at Index on Censorship, says by the time UK PM, Tony Blair, left office, he had built a surveillance state unrivalled anywhere in the democratic world. Parliament passed 45 criminal justice laws—more than the total for the whole of the previous century—creating more than 3,000 new criminal offences. That was two new offences for each day parliament was sitting.

• Police and security forces were given greater powers of arrest and detention
• All institutions of state were granted increased rights to snoop
• Individuals were required to hand over unprecedented amounts of data

New Labour made the left suspicious of civil liberties, liberties it was always concerned to protect, for they are necessarily removed always by fascist governments intent on destroying liberty as a whole. From ID cards to CCTV, to a national DNA database, to long periods of detention without charge, to public order restrictions on protest and curbs on free expression through draconian libel laws, New Labour rewrote the relationship between state and individual. It laid the footings of a fascist state, just as the USA Patriot Act did.

Meanwhile, blatantly unprincipled and hypocritical, Blair’s government colluded with US “special rendition” flights, the transport of terrorist suspects to secret prisons, with transit rights at British airports, and serious questions have been raised about the UK’s role in torture.

A party that should have intervened for social justice and greater equality instead allowed the bankers to rob us by setting up pyramid schemes to pile up bonuses, then, when the scheme inevitably went bust, arranged for we suckers to pay them the huge deficits they had created, and without any noticeable inclination to seek retribution. Instead, ministers sought ever more ingenious ways of watching us, listening to us, and telling us how to lead our lives. Why is all this not sending out a strong whiff of Naziism?

It is all surprising because, in Britain, since Victoria, we have prided ourselves on liberal traditions. Yet now those who complain about individual rights are regarded with disdain or hostility. Kampfner in his book (Freedom for Sale) thinks people around the world, whatever their different cultures or circumstances, have been too willing over the past 20 years to trade certain freedoms in return for the promise of either prosperity or security. We have elevated private freedoms, especially the freedom to earn and spend money, over public freedoms, such as democratic participation and accountability and free expression. What he calls “globalised glut”, the thirst for material comfort, the ultimate anesthetic for the brain.

If he is right, we are now moving from the new 1929 to the new 1930s, with the prospect of a new world war in a decade. Sounds as if we should all be reading this book. The we had better wake up.

Change?

As long as important peaks of the economy are protected by the public, our capitalist system is not capitalist, is it? Contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s slogan TINA, or “There is no Alternative”, and as Obama’s slogan of “Change” emphasized, change is possible, but it is undeniably difficult, and needs open public support to counter the well funded vested interests of the plutocrats. Indeed, swifter changes were needed during World War II, and the government made them. Wartime command economy enabled us to win the war, and mixed economies have proven to be more successful in economic history than doctrinaire capitalism. Why then is economic change not happening now? Why is there no firm move to regulate capitalist enterprises, and even to nationalize those that cannot be allowed to fail. Because Wall Street would not get enough out of it.

Better still than nationalization would be to let stakeholders—the workforce and the local community—take over these industries and make them produce what’s needed by the society with the profits going back to the workforce and community, and kept out of the already bulging purses of the mega rich. The trouble is that Americans have been brainwashed to think of such solutions as evil, as socialist or, heaven forbid, as communist. Yet no society, except the cooperatives of Spanish anarchism, has implemented genuine social production. The reason has nothing to do with these alternative systems not being feasible, or even being evil—cooperatives work!—it is because the Washington caste of lobbyists and the capitalist PR industry will not allow it to enter the consciousness of the US public.

Adam Smith, discussing England, pointed out that the principal architects of policy in England—merchants and manufacturers—made sure that their own interests were attended to, however grievous the effect on others, especially the common people of England. The US has remained stuck in this eighteenth century time warp in its economic philosophy. A lot has changed since Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, and, though much of what he wrote remains true, after over 200 years, it is as doctrinaire to stick to an old economics tome for political economy as it is, after 2000 years, to stick unreservedly to the bible for our moral guidance. The function of US “intellectuals” is to suppress any proper consideration of reform of received thinking. Feigning objective advice, in lofty, obscure and profound rhetoric, they emphasize the objections, difficulties and risks of doing things in a better way, intending all along to discredit any progress. They are servants of the rich. The only real difficulty to economic progress is one of public will, and that exists largely because of the PR success of the ruling class.

US Policies

Exploiting “inferior” nations has been the main objects of US statecraft for a hundred years. It is not for trade that this policy has been adopted. One can trade more fairly with nations that are independent. Exploitation is the correct word to use, for the domination of foreign peoples is purely for US investment, and control of vital resources like oil.

US diplomacy has been the servant of US business and finance. Bush and Cheney were among the most obvious and least subtle examples. These men should be impeached. They got their way by appealing to national prejudice and manipulating it as they liked. Then citizens who otherwise would be outraged that their government is spending their tax dollars on overseas adventures suddenly get a patriotism overload and send their sons and daughters to their deaths so that rogues can fill their coffers with someone else’s hard earned dollars. Taxpayers incur the military expenditure and the adventurers reap the benefit, sometimes even in suitcases of high denomination dollar bills handed over under the cover of war expenditure. Republican voters do not notice when the administration is Republican, only when it is Democratic, because they dance to the tune of an army of Republican cheerleaders in the press and local radio and TV.

The evil and corruption US policies produce at home, the death and devastation they spread abroad, and the reaction of the desire for revenge among the inferior “gooks” and “rag heads” are the price which the world has to pay for its tolerance of the self-seeking liars and greedy crooks who lead world capitalism.

Trying a Little Self Reflexion

Chomsky says Americans must adopt an often recommended but rarely applied principle—look in the mirror. Before they advocate murderous incursions into foreign countries, they must look at themselves to see whether they practise at home what they preach. Maybe the trouble is the fossilization of ancient practices. From the outset, the American nation was based on “extermination”, as the founding fathers put it, and its image as “an infant empire”, as George Washington put it. These ideas seem to be instilled into the American psyche when no one gains from them except the arms manufacturers and the military industrial complex. They were a poor moral basis to build upon, but were profitable for some, and that makes it all right in America.

So too was slavery immoral. The Civil War should have ended slavery, but, after about twenty years, in the South it started to be introduced again, and with the acceptance of the North. The former slaves were criminalized through spurious acts yielding racist laws against “vagrancy” or “talking too loud”. Much of the black male population were thrown into prison by these petty but seriously immoral laws. The victims found themselves permanently incarcerated, various machinations being used to suspend parole and extend the sentence indefinitely. This body of reintroduced slave labor built the accumulated capital at the base of modern industrial society—that of the mining, steel, cotton and other industries. Black men were worse off than they had been under slavery. Slave owners valued the slave to some degree because they had paid good money for him, and so mostly they took care of him. Now black men were like galley slaves, tormented by jailers, and with no appeal for mercy.

Only World War II ended it. The need to recruit, and the absence of soldiers abroad meant black labor had to be freed for more than the prison jobs they had been doing. The new liberation lasted for several decades after the war in the years of the “Golden Age” of capitalism. Then, from 1980, the incarceration of black men again went up sharply to new heights, higher than anywhere else. It was slavery again, prison slavery. So, today, slavery continues in the US where black men are disproportionately held in penitentiaries, and locked up for absurdly cruel terms. To take the moral high ground over what it perceives as injustice abroad, so as to justify sending punitive armies to correct it, the US should first correct its own faults.

What too of the 80% of the US population that sees their own government as run by big interests looking after themselves? Do they really think the US should export a system that they themselves find so grossly unpopular? When 85% of the US population think their government should cut medical costs from their exorbitant level, and leading Congressmen and Senators use dirty tricks to try to stop it, what right do they have to tell distant countries they should not be corrupt, but copy the US. The US can hardly teach anyone lessons. It needs to learn lessons of its own.

Americans brag about their model of US democracy and the American way of life, but seem unable to compare the image and the reality they experience directly, as revealed by opinion polls. People think the US can take freedom to others, but they do not live up to it themselves. Time after time the principles of freedom and democracy are violated. The self perception of the US is entirely distorted.

Iraq and 9/11

When the US first wanted to go to war in Iraq, Bush and Blair gave their war aims as to make Saddam give up WMD. The great intellectual, Condoleezza Rice, thought he was capable of nuking New York. Opinion polls showed US citizens went to war because they feared danger. Many people in the world hated Saddam, but America was the only country in the world scared of him. Saddam had no WMD, then, suddenly, the reason was that the love of democracy was so strongly in our hearts, it justified killing tens of thousands of innocent Arabs to rid ourselves of one dictator. As if in a totalitarian state, the media and intelligentsia enthusiastically fell for it.

The 9/11 attacks were an attack on US policy in the Middle East in particular, and an attack on the West in general because mostly it supports US policy. None of the intelligence agencies or senior policy advisers doubted it, but it could not be admitted to the public. As far as Al Qaida was concerned, the US was picking on Islam, and they were going to defend themselves, but the propaganda is that the US is too Christian to pick on people.

Though 9/11 was a horrible atrocity, what if Al Qaida had been more ambitious and had more resources, and had bombed the White House, killed the President, established a military dictatorship, tortured hundreds of thousands of people, set up an international terrorist center to overthrow governments and kill people all over the world, and introduced economic reforms that ruined the economy. It would have been terrible. Well, it actually happened on 9/11! On 9/11, 1973, when a rogue state, the US, organized the overthrow of the legitimate president—Allende—and government of Chile. It is never counted as terrible, especially in the US, because it was US terror, US violence. US terror is never terror.

America is psychopathic. its citizens are incapable of self reflexion, and self criticism. Whatever they do, however disgustingly immoral and murderous, is always right. Chomsky says Americans have to learn to look at themselves before they start moralizing and punishing the rest of the world. They should start fearing God, instead of thinking they are His Great Angel.

Increasing Inequality—the Gini Coefficient

Our greatest current philosopher, Ted Honderich, starkly sums up the New Labour experiment we have been suffering since grinning Tony won over the electoral masses in 1997. Labour activists and voters were delighted, but not lefties and socialists who characterized Blair as the first Labour Prime Minister not to have waited until he got into power to sell out. His New Labour had already manifestly abandoned everything that made labour a party of the working class.

Blair’s and Brown’s record since have proved that the New Labour party hasn’t a principle that it is not willing to ditch, that it was not about offering us a new set of policies, but was about selling us a more colourful shade of Thatcherism (aka Reaganism), and that this “selling” amounted to telling lie after lie after lie, trowelling on the lies so heavily that Brown got completely tangled in his web of deceit, something that Blair knew by his burglar’s instinct was about to unravel so he got on his bike and cycled off at full speed, trying to grab as much loot as he could while wobbling off.

The outcome in Great Britain is that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Ordinary workers have ridden on the stoked up debt mountain for the past decade as much as the bankers, giving them the illusion of being better off, but Brown was determined to leave us feeling sorry. He handed a trillion or so pounds sterling to bankers, and left the working class in hock for the next fifty years.

The Gini Coefficient is a statistical measure of inequality, running from 0 to 100, where 0 is perfect equality and 100 perfect inequality. The Gini index for Thatcher governments was 29 or 30. For Blair and Brown, it was about 35, and it continues to worsen apace under Cameron. UK society is much less equal than it was before the turkeys voted for Thanksgiving Day, or Christmas in our case.

Blair lined up with his chum George W Bush not only to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Arabs, but also to mould Britain closer to the US, seen by Blair as ideal—the Great Society, no doubt. The Gini coefficient in the US is around 45, and that too has been growing for three decades.

It’s not a shock that you get turned away from a hospital if your breathing’s getting worse and you couldn’t afford health insurance… For president, America is getting a choice of millionaires at this election. It won’t be as clear this time as last election, though, that it doesn’t matter who wins. Last time America proved that, by not really trying to find out who won.

In the supposedly greatest democracy in history, it seemed inexplicable why Americans were not outraged at Bush’s blatant gerrymandering and electoral rigging, but Americans seemed uninterested. Honderich is right, as are the 50% of people who cannot be bothered to register and vote in the US—what is the point? The US is not a democracy, it is a plutocracy! Britain has taken giant steps in the same direction under New Labour. We should all be objecting in a big way before it is too late.

Greed, Justice and Revolution

The philosopher, Bertrand Russell pointed out a hundred years ago that human beings may be motivated broadly by the desire to possess things or the desire to build things. Property is the direct expression of possessiveness. Science and art are direct expressions of constructiveness.

The dominant feature of possessiveness is hostility toward others, either because what others possess is envied, or because the possessor of something others desire is concerned to prevent them from having it. Generally anyone taking what is another’s is doing wrong, but, in the case of great injustice in society, redistribution of wealth in favour of greater fairness is just, and then resisting this justice is unjust. The reason is that society must be stable to survive, and gross injustice renders it unstable. John Rawls allowed that this is so.

Even wealthy people have a greater interest in keeping the society which has allowed them to get very wealthy stable rather than collapse in disorder or revolution, and to yield a little of vast wealth is no hardship to them. And the United Nations Charter of Human Rights—much maligned by the right wing press—also recognizes that revolution can be justified when society is grossly unjust.

…it is essential, if man is not compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…

Rawls, bending to US realities, allowed that a society did not have to be egalitarian when inequality helped the poorest in society to be better off, but he saw that excessive inequality could only destabilize society, and consequently that class differences, if necessary, ought to be small.

The modern USA has ignored this hitherto, and, if Obama, now is trying to do something about it in the one field of health care, Americans ought to be glad. Regrettably, too many of them are conditioned by bigotry and selfishness. The dangers to America are not from outside. Americans need to examine themselves more closely.

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