RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events United States government...Yay or Nay

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They love America the way a four year old loves their mommy. [We] love America like grown-up's. To a four year old, everything mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow.

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Originally posted by britneyspearsatemyshorts:
I actually think we have beaten this topic to death in many threads....

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i thought we discussed it in every thread! even boobies pics are often discarded as too right wing now, while ass and thong shots are mere pawns of the left

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Originally posted by whomod:
The problem with the question itself I think is, i think, that if you say that you think our Government does some pretty unscruplous things then you're instantly branded un-American in some circles.

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Originally posted by Darknight613:
I've never really trusted politicians period, regardles of nationality or political party. I see politicians as opprtunists who tell people what they want to hear, or give them someone to blame, and are either unable or unwilling to follow up on it.

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The Real Cost of That $8.63 Polo Shirt

I don't know about you, but when I read the three-part series on how Wal-Mart does business in the U.S. and around the world, one figure in particular jumped out at me.

It was in a section about how manufacturing and other jobs have been driven out of the United States as the discount chain chases cheap labor and supplies to the ends of the earth so it can provide shoppers absolute rock-bottom prices.

A mother named Isabel Reyes works 10 hours a day in a Honduras sweatshop, stitching fabric to make polo shirts.

And the price to us, back here in the good ol' U.S. of A., is $8.63.

Did I read that correctly — $8.63?

Is that the best Wal-Mart can do?

Now wait a minute. Because of the way Wal-Mart does business in America and beyond:

A. Your Uncle Ed's factory went under and he's on the dole,

B. A couple dozen merchants got rocked by the ripple effect,

C. A nail was driven into the coffin that used to be a quaint downtown,

D. That Honduran mom made $7 for 10 hours of toil,

E. A Chinese company is probably plotting to underbid the Hondurans,

F. Wal-Mart execs padded their mega-million-dollar portfolios,

G. And our taxes are going up because Wal-Mart employees who can't afford health insurance are dragging themselves into the county emergency room.

If that's the cost to you and me and everyone else, that polo shirt ought to be $5.99 and not a penny more, or we're being seriously ripped off.

I went back and checked the section on Isabel Reyes to see if there's a way Wal-Mart can squeeze a little more production out of her, and sure enough, that laggard isn't pulling her weight.

She sews sleeves onto roughly 1,200 shirts a day, and although her bosses keep cracking the whip, she wonders why there's no extra pay for additional work.

Ten hours is 10 hours, Isabel. You're lucky to have a job at all.

Comprende?

I'll admit that others see it differently.

"The unfortunate reality is that [some] corporations are preying on the desperate poverty of working people in other parts of the world, undermining worker rights, polluting the environment, and violating human rights based on the fact that they can get away with it," says UCLA labor researcher Kent Wong

What does he know?

I say we're in deep, and there's no turning back. We don't need to slow down the Wal-Martization of the world, we need to speed it up.

Take the 70,000 grocery workers walking picket lines in Southern California, trying to hold onto wage-and-benefit packages that pay $10 more per hour than Wal-Mart.

Who needs those annoying pickets, and who needs Ralphs and Vons and Albertsons when we've got Wal-Mart?

They can all go under and nobody will miss them because Wal-Mart is charging into California with 40 Supercenters. A Supercenter, by the way, is the usual galactic Wal-Mart enormity, along with an equally colossal grocery section.

If we all shop there, Wal-Mart will be able to buy in even higher volume, and we'll all pay less.

Would you believe $1.19 for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes?

Actually, I'd go for something a little healthier, because the one thing we all want to be lower than food prices is taxes. As a result, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing cuts in medical care, cuts for the disabled, foster children and the poor.

On the up side, a can of soup could be as low as 28 cents.

"Among all the industrial countries of the world, the U.S. has by far the largest gap between rich and poor," says UCLA's Wong, who just won't stop yammering about how the rich get richer and the bottom is dropping out of the middle class.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti is trying to set up roadblocks for when Sam Walton's boys ride into town to scout locations.

Garcetti co-authored a proposed ordinance that aims to dictate location, grill Wal-Mart on its wage-and-benefits package and require an economic impact report.

Forget that. I'd like to know why a pair of pants has to be more than $7.

"I grew up in the Valley and remember talking with folks who said the GM in Van Nuys had the effect on local neighborhoods of lifting up wages for everybody," Garcetti said. "A super Wal-Mart has the opposite effect. It drags down wages for everybody."

Who cares about wages? Our problem is high prices, not low wages.

Back to Honduras, our friend Isabel Reyes said she can barely hold a pot handle or lift her child when she gets home from the factory after sewing all those polo shirts. Maybe if you popped a few more of those anti-inflammatory drugs, you'd pull yourself together, Isabel.

You think we got it easy here in the U.S., circling, circling, circling for a parking space so we can run in there and buy the polo shirt that keeps you in high cotton?

Like the boss says, faster, faster, faster, because we need cheaper, cheaper, cheaper.

As it is, that polo shirt is costing us a fortune.

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does the right thing kinda guy -- like the movie "dave!"

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Originally posted by Dave:
Well, if someone is going to have the world's largest nuclear arsenal, I'd rather it be you guys than those damn Chileans. Or even worse, Australians.

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The Pinochet File

A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

Edited by Peter Kornbluh

The New Press: 552 pp., $29.95

Exactly 30 years ago, on that other Tuesday, Sept. 11, as Chilean Air Force jets bombed the government palace where I worked as a young translator to elected socialist President Salvador Allende, as Chilean troops trampled a century of democratic rule (and the dark night of a dictatorship that would last 17 years descended), we understood that the U.S. played some role in the coup.

A year before, Jack Anderson made public some of the anti-Allende machinations concocted by the Nixon administration in cahoots with the ITT corporation. In the ensuing years, kick-started by the 1976 Senate Church Committee investigations, much more about American covert action has come to light in dribs and drabs.

Now, thanks to Peter Kornbluh, we have the first complete, almost day-to-day and fully documented record of this sordid chapter in Cold War American history. Much in the way Stephen Kinzer's "Bitter Fruit" fully chronicled the CIA intromission into Guatemala, "The Pinochet File" should be considered the long-awaited book of record on U.S. intervention in Chile. Here is a veritable catalog of all the smoking guns used by Washington to obliterate Chilean democracy. But anyone hoping to find documentary evidence only of an arrogant imperial power blithely manipulating its pliant Latin American ally for its geopolitical gain is in for some surprises.

As a senior researcher at the nonprofit National Security Archives, Kornbluh was instrumental in securing almost 25,000 new Chile-related documents released after the 1998 London arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Kornbluh has done much more than assemble a clump of dense photocopied files full of bureaucratese. Instead, he's written a crisp, compelling narrative, almost a political thriller, wisely including scores of government documents as only secondary documentation. "The Pinochet File" reads as the definitive and damning indictment of Pinochet and his regime as well as his enablers, protectors and apologists in Washington. It's also a cautionary tale of the consequences incurred when a great power squanders its prestige and principles in defense of dictators and despots.

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Originally posted by Dave:
There is some truth in that crack. Ollie North breaks the law, and there is a national scandal and he goes to gaol. If that happened in most countries, no one in government would bat an eyelid.

Hoorah for transparent democracies. America fucks up just like the rest of us, but its good that the dirty laundry gets aired.

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Political Science - Randy Newman

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them

Asia's crowded and Europe's too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada's too cold
And South America stole our name
Let's drop the big one
There'll be no one left to blame us

We'll save Australia
Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo
We'll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin', too

Boom goes London and boom Paree
More room for you and more room for me
And every city the whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it will be
We'll set everybody free
You'll wear a Japanese kimono
And there'll be Italian shoes for me

They all hate us anyhow
So let's drop the big one now
Let's drop the big one now

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How's your Mandarin, Dave? One day China will realize it owns everything already.

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March 17, 2004


THE WORLD
U.S. Seen Unfavorably, Poll Shows

Mistrust of America and other negative feelings have grown stronger nearly a year after the Iraq war began, a survey in nine countries says.

By Sonni Efron, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A year after the start of the Iraq war, mistrust of the United States abroad has intensified, and the ill will toward America has begun to erode support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism, according to a global attitude survey released Tuesday.

The ongoing study of public opinion in nine countries was conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in February and March — before last week's bombings in Madrid and the subsequent electoral defeat of the Spanish government, which had contributed troops to the Iraq war. Spain was not included in the survey.

The study illuminates the widening gulf between the American public's beliefs and those of key U.S. allies — a divide thrust into the public eye Sunday with the surprise defeat of one of the Bush administration's staunchest allies on Iraq and the war on terrorism, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

Although most Americans believe that the war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein helped in the global fight against terrorism, majorities in Germany, France and Turkey, and half of those surveyed in Britain and Russia, think the U.S.-led invasion undermined the struggle against terrorism.

Large majorities in Russia, France, Germany, Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan — and 58% in Britain and 50% in Jordan — said that the war had diminished their trust in the United States. But 58% of Americans thought the opposite.

Most of those polled in Germany, France, Russia, Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan — and 48% of Moroccans — said they believed that American and British leaders lied when they claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Majorities in six countries and 48% in Russia said that the United States is not sincere in its motives for the war on terrorism. Only Americans say that they have more confidence than before the war that the United States wants to promote democracy around the world.

"It is disturbing that Americans are the only ones surveyed who believe the war in Iraq helped, rather than hurt, in fighting Al Qaeda," said Madeleine Albright, who served as secretary of State under President Clinton. "It is also troubling that the Iraqi conflict has caused each of the other countries polled to lose confidence in America's honesty and commitment to democracy."

The Pew poll has been carefully studied in the past by the Bush administration and various government and private commissions grappling with America's declining standing abroad and growing anti-American sentiment in much of the Islamic world.

An alarmed State Department also has commissioned its own polls, which have found similar trends to those cited by Pew, according to officials who have seen the data.

U.S. officials had argued that although the plummeting popularity of the United States caused deep concern, it had probably reached its low point during the last Pew survey last May, shortly after the end of major combat in Iraq, and they expected that it would rebound.

The new poll did show some bright spots for the Bush administration, such as less apparent hostility in some nations with Islamic majorities. For example, the percentage expressing a very unfavorable view of the United States dropped in Turkey from 68% in May to 45% in this survey; in Pakistan from 71% to 50%; in Jordan from 83% to 67%; and in Morocco from 53% to 46%.

But large majorities still view the U.S. unfavorably. And although America and Europe share an archenemy in Osama bin Laden, President Bush was rated even less favorably than Bin Laden in Jordan, Morocco and Pakistan — a key ally in the U.S. war on terrorism and the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader.

Moreover, nearly half of Pakistanis, as well as 70% of Jordanians and 66% of Moroccans, said suicide attacks against Americans in Iraq were justified. Even 31% of Turks surveyed agreed.

The survey found a significant erosion of U.S. standing in Britain, a development that, together with the Spanish election results, could prove threatening to Bush's most important ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Only 43% of Britons surveyed in the latest poll believe that Blair made the right decision in using force against Iraq, down from 61% in May.

Support for the war among Americans fell from 74% to 60% in the same period.

Although European leaders have stressed their desire to improve ties with the United States — and argued that success in rebuilding and democratizing Iraq is in every nation's interest — transatlantic tensions in public opinion are unabated. Growing majorities in Britain, France and Germany want the European Union to be as powerful as the United States and want their foreign policy and security arrangements to be independent from Washington, the survey found.

"It's a fact, whether we like it or not, that there's a huge problem with the credibility of America in Europe and beyond," a senior European diplomat said.

The problem is due not simply to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the diplomat said, but also to what he called the "Guantanamo element" — the view, especially among European youth, that the United States is not the defender of freedom, civil liberties and other ideals that it purports to be. The U.S. has been holding hundreds of terrorism suspects, including European citizens, at its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without formal charges or access to lawyers. — some for more than two years.

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the G-man said:
It's funny. All the liberals voting "nay" on the U.S. Government are typically the ones advocating its expansion.

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Y'know G-man, your ilks cliches and mischaractrizations have served you guys so well time and again, I say "stick with them".

Bush becomes 'big government conservative'

GWB's CONTRIBUTION TO BIG GOVERNMENT

HUNDREDS OF WAYS IN WHICH GEORGE W. BUSH HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT

And yet you still get all bent out of shape and call people "hate filled" when they call you guys for the liars you are.

Oh....

by the way, if you stop to actually READ THE ARTICLE, you might notice that American "liberals" wearn't the ones being polled.

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whomod said:

GWB's CONTRIBUTION TO BIG GOVERNMENT

HUNDREDS OF WAYS IN WHICH GEORGE W. BUSH HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT

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by the way, if you stop to actually READ THE ARTICLE, you might notice that American "liberals" wearn't the ones being polled.

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the G-man said:


Actually that comment wasn't directed at the people being polled. It was directed at people such as yourself who post such things to support your claims of a corrupt government, all the while advocating for its expansion...or working for it.

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whomod said:
America's newfound disdain among OUR F**ING ALLIES!

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