The American people were traditionally raised with the expectation that if they were obedient and responsible, respectful of other people's rights and interests, worked hard and did their civic duties, then their needs would be more than met and taken care of in a reciprocal manner by the appointed and official representatives of the American system. It was a sense of protection, if not promotion, of their collective interests that was implicit to a contract based system rooted in the ideals of political equality of all people, regardless of their religion, creed, or color. This was traditionally the purpose and role of the government, of the people, by the people and for the people. This was the promise and realization of the American dream. 

American people were educated in open, affordable and progressive institutions of public education and were taught, among other things, that if they did well in their studies and made good grades, then in the long run their efforts, their "deferment" of gratification of the pursuit of life-interests, would be rewarded by higher than average career earnings and a better quality and quantity of life. People of my generation, the peak of the Baby Boomers, reached adulthood only to discover that the promises made to them in their youth were not kept, and that in fact the sacrosanct institutions of education were being manipulated on an income-generating, capitalist model, and the jobs forthcoming, handed over primarily and increasingly to foreign born.

"Diversity" disguising "affirmative action/reverse discrimination" quotas, were utilized as catchwords to validate and legitimize these process, and if one argued against the systematic loss of opportunity and job structures by the Americans in favor of foreign-born groups who had not previously participated or contributed to the system, then one was simply labeled a "racist" and thus systematically disenfranchised from the system even further. Such disenfranchisement has been the secret weapon of the conservative elite, as it amounts to social ethnocide and homicide through exclusion and denial of participation of productive contexts.

"Economic Progress" was another ideological means for granting blanket legitimization to these processes, even though it was never asked exactly how the widespread loss of opportunity and the systematic, planned wasting of educational resources were to promote modern development, except by allusion to some vague, neo-capitalist "laissez-faire" model of "trickle down," that amounted to the blanket abnegation of governmental responsibilities  to serve collective interests. It was never openly asked whether or not alternative pathways might achieve a more balanced and healthier outcome of modern development than the policies that were in fact and practice to become mandated by the government.

The tragedy of modern American life is that the collective interests of the American people have been largely abandoned by the American government and its political system, in favor of highly specialized private interests, lobby groups and, increasingly, ethno-political communal interest groups, and these same sets of interests of the American people, what was once called aphoristically the American Pie, have been put upon the international trading block for the highest bidder.  Foreign born administrators of our brave new "diversified" system may not really comprehend the cultural fundamentals of a democratic framework that they were not born or raised within. But this sense of cultural legitimacy was also denied its heritage and roots on the American frontier--and was equated with being merely an importation from Europe.

In other words, for the past quarter century, the American government has aggressively pursued policies that have in the long run hurt the collective interests of the American people. It has done so in a deliberate and consistent manner, and this effort has spanned the political spectrum of Republican and Democrat, so that the incumbency of one party or the other into political office at all levels of government has made almost no difference at all. The American government has done so because it has largely forfeited the individual-social contract model that it was based upon originally, in favor of a model of ethno-cultural empowerment and inter-group competition and implicitly legitimizing the exercise of communal solidarity by some ethnocultural groupings while systematically and explicitly tabooing it to the majority of Americans. It has placed an over-weaning administrative bureaucracy to control access to collective resources, and it has permitted private  and foreign interests a measure of influence and control over the domestic affairs of American society at unprecedented levels.

American government today, at all levels, is defined by two key features: inherent structural conflict of interest between promotion of private and public interest policies, and the growth of a form of top-down, administrative authoritarianism, that, though civilian in style and dress, is rather para-military in its mind-set and approach to social policy planning and implementation. This has been reinforced by a tendency to recruit military commanders and ex-CIA operatives into key bureaucratic positions. Because of the need for unlimited campaign funds by the highest profile politicians, promotion of private interests has come to take precedence over serving the public good.

During this time frame, population has surged from zero-growth in the early 1970's, with immigration serving as replacement of negative-growth factors, to one of the highest socially induced growth rates in the world, to become the 3rd most populous nation on earth. Cheap labor is allowed to come in, undercutting the minimum wage labor force, and increasingly, more expensive middle-class jobs are being out-sourced to foreign labor markets where there are fewer restrictions and fewer demands made by labor. Bias in hiring, favoring foreign-born residents, to the systematic exclusion of American born citizens, has further exacerbated the problem and in many instances, has largely undermined the screens of opportunity for working and middle class Americans who cannot claim ethnic front-of-the-line privileges.

This has been a process that has been taking shape for several decades in the name of a one-sided asymmetrical globalization. The events of 9/11 brought to the foreground in an obvious, undeniable way, the extent to which the American government had let go of and largely ignored the collective interests of the American people. The fact of INS issuing Mohammed Atta a visa for flight lessons several months later only served to put icing on the cake of the indictment against the loss of good faith by the American government on behalf of the American people's own best interests. The Bush administration has consistently used 9/11 as an excuse and justification for pursuing aggressive, neo-imperialist policies abroad against even the will and mandate of the International political community and outside of the formal paradigms of International law. In spite of this, more than 5 million new illegal immigrants entered the US subsequent to 9/11, more than the two years previously, and demonstrating the lack of essential reform.

American political institutions and administrative machinery has as largely entrenched itself and put itself beyond the purview of accountability and reform by the American people, and its culture of denial and culture of correctness serve to prevent further reforms from being initiated in the hope of restoring some form of equilibrium to the system. America has grown more militarized, not less, sense the debacle of the Vietnam war, and their has been a surge of para-military institutions.

It is good in essays such as this, and quite in the spirit of American consent by will, to be openly critical of the policies and actions of the American government, and their efforts to obfuscate and misdirect the attention of the American people away from issues that critically affect their lives on a daily basis. The freedoms of press won during the Vietnam years have been systematically circumvented and even suppressed, and hence the sense of control and manipulation of the media image and presentation of facts, information and understanding about the world has largely fallen prey not only to the CIA black budget, but to a new form of sponsorship and tutelage that witnesses retired generals in civilian attire, business suits and funky, plain ties, narrating in self-evident terms on prime time the unfolding events of the most recent battle to a group of school children.

The greatest concern is not so much for the loss of latitude and freedom of the American people in everyday social life, and the restructuring of their screens of opportunity from above that has led to the shrinkage of their average piece of pie in spite of the overall growth of the total pie, but the loss of a coherent and realistic worldview, and a sense of vision of the kind of future we can create. We are met today only with uncertainty and insecurity in the future, without a form of leadership that can offer anything other than conservative status quo politics. Contradictions embedded in the American system mount almost on a daily basis. It is not that Americans are increasingly unable to realize alternatives in their daily lives and their pursuit of happiness than what becomes sanctioned and mandated by a huge leviathan of a system, but they cannot even imagine that serious or realistic alternatives actually may exist for them in the long run.

The bottom-line is that the American system is today without any real spin control, in spite of all the media manipulation and propaganda efforts to convince the American people that they still live in the best of possible worlds. It is an air-plane whose socio-economic system has suddenly stalled, due to gross imbalances and disparities of incomes and opportunity structures afforded to different categories of Americans, and is spinning out of control in a downward spiral. Being such a massive system, the sense of stall is not a process that occurs in a day or even in a month. Policies pursued deliberately and with great effort by the American government for the last quarter century have proven to be short-sighted and self-serving, without regard to the collective interests of the American people and without the capability of internal self-reform.

It may be argued that these processes were perhaps inevitable, given the tendencies of human beings to always manipulate and test their limits. I think that many of these possibilities and patterns that were emergent from the American system were avoidable, but only with the kind of leadership from Americans of the caliber and moral fiber of Abraham Lincoln, and not the ilk of Bill Clinton or George Bush. These outcomes have been the natural and logical outcome of certain basic contradictions that were inherent to the structure of the American government pretty much from the beginning, as well as the resonance amplification effect of somewhat misguided social planning policies that arose out of the activist movements of the 1960's. It is in the nature of the American system to incorporate and "capitalize" all policies, liberal or otherwise, and to appropriate to the promotion of self-interest new ideas and viewpoints that were originally intended to be anything but self-serving. This is part of the inherent dialectic of the American framework that has made this kind of outcome almost inevitable. The social reforms of the Roosevelt Era that created a strong middle-class and upward mobility for the working classes, were largely undone in the first term of office of Ronald Reagan, and since then the system has been marked by increasing polarization and stratification between the rich and the poor--the poor getting poorer and the rich becoming richer. Inter-position of foreign labor and brains has served to mediate and to some extent disguise this process of stratification and to mollify in the public eye some of the harsher realities associated with such polarization. At the same time, systematic importation of labor and working capital in the form of foreign based investments has been used as a tool for systematically undercutting the mechanisms and protectionisms serving the working classes in their efforts for upward mobility, and to also undermine the middle classes by their systematic displacement. Home-based and home-grown scholars, businessmen, and farmers in the US are finding it harder and harder, impossible, in fact, to compete in the same playing field with foreign based interest groups, without the protection or benefit of support by the American government that these foreign interests enjoy by their own governments, as well, more often than not, by the support and encouragement of the American government itself.

Though many would argue this case, defending the ideology of diversity and self-interest tooth and nail with charges of racial bias, etc., the bottom line remains that these have been undeniable social historical patterns rooted in solid facts and sound rationality. America has always been a land where the "pursuit of happiness" has been demonstrated by means of an inveterate addiction and promotion of self-interest whatever the social costs or consequences. It has been a hidden price we have paid for our freedoms. The indictment is clear--the American government has been involved in a general twenty-five-year-old conspiracy aimed at systematically disenfranchising the American people in the name and in the pursuit of private interest and profit through the manipulation and articulation of administrative control structures that are not directly accountable to the American people in any form or fashion, and also systematically obfuscating these realities by the arbitrary manipulation of the media and control of information and access to resources. The process continues today, the government having set itself beyond the purview of reform by an inside culture of denial, and this process, as it develops, threatens in the long run both the democratic foundations of a free world and the economic foundations of a healthy and vigorous society.