...oil, gas, minerals, farm land, forests, buildings/property, etc. (not to mention hoards of taxpayers' cash) from tyrannical foreign powers (China, Saudi Arabia, et al) and tyrannical transglobal corporations (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Citicorp, Monsanto, Bechtel, Boise-Cascade, et al).
We have so many tyrannical powers controlling our government, our resources, and our lives and welfare--sometimes competing against each other, but mostly working in concert to loot and disempower us--that ours is a more complex situation than Argentina's, where its former colonizer, Spain, managed to continue colonization by a different means, corporate rule. Severe that tyranny, and Argentine sovereignty is almost achieved.
Argentinians have already done yeoman's work to free themselves from World Bank/IMF tyranny and U.S. "free trade for the rich," and to strengthen their democracy and recover from "first world" looting and plundering. Recovering control of its oil from Spain is the end of a long process of democratization. While this has not exactly been a simple--nor easy--process, and involves not just Argentina but a democracy/sovereignty revolution throughout Latin America (including the new leftist principle of "south-south" cooperation, trade and mutual aid), our situation appears, at least on the surface, to be, not just complex, but unsolvable. It isn't unsolvable. We just have to start somewhere--as the Latin Americans have done.
My recommendation: start with the corporate-run, 'TRADE SECRET' voting systems, now everywhere in the U.S., in every state. We need a REAL "Boston Tea Party" to throw these machines into 'Boston Harbor' (so to speak). That can snowball into an anti-corporate revolution.
That's what we need, ultimately--a peoples' revolution against our corporate masters, with not just re-regulation and re-taxation of these looters and evildoers, but complete dismantling of their corporations--pulling their corporate charters and seizing their assets for the common good. Such a revolution needn't be anti-capitalist, merely anti-monopoly and anti-bigness--if our people want to retain aspects of REAL capitalism--i.e., a truly free marketplace consisting of small businesses and innovators, tempered by government-enforced labor rights and social responsibility. What we have now is neither capitalism nor democracy. It is fascism (the welding together of private corporations with state power). THAT is why the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, and the government is engaged in corporate resource wars, among other abominations. This is NOT capitalism, and it is extremely anti-democratic.
Corporations, initially, in the United States, were permitted FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD, for limited time periods, and their charters could be pulled for any reason or no reason. They were never intended to live forever, gobbling up wealth and becoming tyrannical powers. The pooling of capital to proceed with some worthy project, of benefit to all, on a temporary basis, is one thing; the tyranny of capital is quite another thing. It is a crime of the first magnitude against human rights. It's what the U.S. colonies rebelled against! (The British East India Company.)
To get to the point where we have any chance at all to elect a real democrat--an FDR-like president who will take on "organized money" on our behalf--and real democrats in Congress and in state houses, and evict these Diebold-selected leaders*, we must first restore vote counting to the PUBLIC VENUE. That is the bottom line of democracy and we have lost it--with not one line of this horrendous and historic news appearing in the Corporate Press.
That is what Argentines have and we don't--the ability to elect leaders who act, with courage and vision, in the public interest.
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*(I think Obama was truly elected, on the hopes and dreams of the American people for peace and social justice, and by a greater margin than we know (5% to 10% bigger margin), but he was also permitted to be elected and that is the problem. To be permitted to be elected, he had to make deals. One of them we can surely surmise was no prosecution, or even investigation, of Bush Junta war criminals. What other deals did he make? Insurance-run health care? No serious cuts to the military? Continued privatization of military and other government contracts? Continued "war on drugs" as backup war profiteering? Trillion dollar bankster bailout? No serious reform of any kind? Believe me, the 'TRADE SECRET' voting system--which spread like a cancer over the whole country during the 2002 to 2004 period--can "deliver" for its corporate pals. It is now about 80% owned and controlled by ONE, PRIVATE, FAR RIGHTWING-CONNECTED corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold. Our corporate masters are not stupid. They knew we needed a period of "forgetting" of the horrendous war and financial crimes of the Bush Junta. Obama is the president of "forgetting." And, to make sure of Obama, they additionally saddled him with the most unrepresentative Congress that we have ever seen. The Scumbag Congress. They now have the power to do this--with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--and that's what they did.)
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