PR Primary, Plebiscite, Statehood Petition. Mitt Romney won the Puerto Rico Republican primary today. Why is a territory that cannot vote for President allowed to have any input whatsoever in the determination of a candidate for President? That makes no sense.
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Nor does the neither-nor status of Puerto Rico — neither statehood nor independence — make any sense. PR (a fully respectful abbreviation for Puerto Rico, from zip-code convention) is politically, psychologically, and economically paralyzed, stunted, by its indecision on status. It wastes enormous energy in an unending debate over what the island's relationship with the United States should be.
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Investors from the U.S. and other countries cannot confidently pour millions of dollars into a territory that might, at any moment, declare independence and embark upon a Cuban-style reign of confiscatory nationalization of private property. (Cuba was once under U.S. jurisdiction, but was (stupidly) given independence, in that no one could foresee Cuba being taken over by anti-U.S. Communists either.) While some investors might think a paroxysm of nationalization in PR is extremely unlikely, it is also very unlikely that PR would unilaterally declare independence. So if PR were to be swept up in nationalistic fervor powerful enuf to produce a declaration of independence — which Congress and the President would almost certainly agree to, given anti-Puerto Rican bias in the ruling class of the mainland — the island might also embark upon a radical-nationalist program of confiscation of foreign-owned property.
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A news report about the PR primary on the Huffington Post today says:

In Puerto Rico, the race was focused on the issue of statehood, and [Enrique Melendez, the Republican representative on the Puerto Rican State Electoral Commission] said, "This proves Gov. Romney's electability and his ability to reach out to Hispanics and minorities."

Whether that's true or not, Romney told Puerto Ricans he would support statehood while Santorum said English would have to be the official language of the island if it were to join the United States – a statement that roiled residents.

"In Puerto Rico, we get along fine with both languages," said Francisco Rodriguez, a 76-year-old architect who supported Romney and hopes Puerto Rico becomes the nation's 51st state.

Romney aggravated some Puerto Ricans in attacking Obama's appointment of Sonia Sotomayor as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Romney's attempt to claim that his hostility to Sotomayor was based on her judicial philosophy rather than her ethnicity did not persuade everyone.
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An opinion piece by Ishton W. Morton at the Cincinnati Examiner's website on March 16th says in part:

According to Kasie Hunt with the Associated Press Santorum while campaigning in San Juan, Puerto Rico said making English the official language for Puerto Ricans should be a 'condition' for granting statehood [to] Puerto Rico.

Santorum continues to say; “The Island will have to make sure English is spoken universally." ...

There is currently no law declaring an official language of the United States, though several attempts have been made to give English that designation. Thirty-one states have passed laws mandating English as their official language.

Since the U. S. Constitution makes no reference [to] a language test for territories or properties that wish to become states Santorum['s] continued position on this matter seems to be potentially bigoted in principle. * * *

However, Puerto Rico is set to hold a referendum on statehood in November. Whether to become the 51st state is the critical issue for this U. S. territory. Ne[i]ther Puerto Rico [n]or the U. S. Virgin Islands ha[s] full voting rights in Congress. Also, the idea of being able to vote in presidential primaries and not presidential elections is completely ridiculous.

The Presidential primary in PR is a waste of PR taxpayers' money. And PR is going to waste more taxpayer money and enormous political and emotional energy in November on yet another pointless, nonbinding referendum on status. Even the best result, a resounding vote for statehood, could not in itself make PR a State of the Union, because that is not within PR's gift but wholly up to Congress.
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Republican candidates for President since at least Bush the Elder keep saying they favor PR statehood, but then do absolutely nothing to make PR a state. The reality is that a lot of Republicans would vote against statehood for Puerto Rico on the most meanspirited basis: that Puerto Ricans would likely send Democrats to both houses of Congress, and vote Democratic for President! Former Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice was open about that in a Republican Governors meeting in PR in 1998. His stance (and surely that of other Republicans, who won't say so aloud) is that you have no right to vote if you don't vote "right". Thus the attempts by Republicans in various states to prevent large numbers of Democratically inclined citizens from voting with foto-ID legislation.
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Santorum is open in opposing statehood on the basis of language, even tho it may have cost him heavily in the PR primary. Is Santorum using language as an excuse, when his actual opposition to PR statehood is the same as Fordice's, fear that a State of PR would send Democrats to Congress and add its electoral vote to the Democratic vote for President? I can't say. Plainly PR is not going to make English the (sole) official language of Puerto Rico — it is already co-official, with Spanish — so Santorum could cloak his opposition on the basis of how Puerto Ricans would likely vote, in the relatively respectable stance that all Americans should be able to speak and read English. A story on Bloomberg News says:

Santorum was hurt by comments he made to the Spanish-language newspaper Vocero that the territory, 99 percent Hispanic, needed to make English its main language if it was to become a state. There is no such federal requirement.

Wikipedia says that "85 percent [of Puerto Ricans] reported that they did not speak English 'very well.'" What chance, then, is there that the government of Puerto Rico will make English the sole official language?
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The widespread appearance of Spanish on ballots in many elections around the United States may be a direct result of the current relationship of the U.S. and PR, in that, since 1917, anyone born in PR has automatically gained U.S. citizenship even if they later learned not one word of English. So mainland areas that had significant Spanish-speaking populations were mandated to provide Spanish on ballots (even if their speakers of Spanish were NOT born in PR). Americans concerned that bilingualism produces social division would be happy to remove Spanish from election ballots, and thus may regard the present relationship between the U.S. and PR as an unreasonable imposition upon Americans. If PR is given independence, the mainland may be freed from the requirement that Spanish appear, and ballots might again be unilingual.
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The current colonial condition of PR is also expensive to U.S. taxpayers. A few years ago, the cost was put at $11 billion a year!
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On January 3rd, I placed the following petition on the SignOn.org website (a project of MoveOn.org) under the heading, "Statehood for Puerto Rico (including the USVI)".

To be delivered to: The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama

End the second-class status of U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands by joining those two colonies into a single 51st State. If a ratifying plebiscite rejects statehood, whichever territory rejects it should be forced into independence, saving U.S. taxpayers money that can be spent on people who value U.S. citizenship.

There are four million "citizens" of the United States in two adjoining colonies in the Caribbean, the misnamed "Commonwealth" of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Real, first-class citizens have the right to vote for President and Congress, but 4 million Americans in the Caribbean have no such right.

Unfortunately, no one found this petition at that site, and there are only two signatures, both from the Expansionist Party of the United States. If you favor statehood for Puerto Rico, you might sign it too, and alert others to its existence.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:12 PM links to this post

 
Defending a Mass-Murderer's Identity! Why on Earth has the Pentagon concealed the identity of the soldier who went on a mass-murdering rampage in Afghanistan? How does he have any privacy rights, or indeed any rights at all? Not only should his identity have been revealed immediately — as is the identity of EVERYONE accused of a similar crime in the United States — but he should also be turned over to the Afghan people for trial and execution. No way in the world do we have any right nor reason to protect that monster from the righteous wrath of the Afghan people.
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The insane choice to suppress his identity tells Afghans that there will be no justice, but the U.S. Government will defend him and rationalize away his crimes. That CANNOT be what we want the people of Afghanistan to believe. We must show our solidarity with Afghans, and our absolute disapproval of what he did, by disowning him, and sending him to his fate in the criminal-justice system of that tragic country.
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Hoist with Their Own, Plutocratic Petard. Republicans have been loud and long-winded in praising the value to society of unrestricted expenditures by the rich in political matters. Now they are seeing their own people crushed by money. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are being outspent 10:1 and more by Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul is being outspent by much more than that. Now the financial underdogs are complaining that Romney is trying to buy the nomination thru an unfair advantage in funding. Oh? I thought you LOVED economic inequality. It is supposed to provide us with vast benefits in giving incentive to people to do better! So, take that message, Santorum and Gingrich. Work harder! You too can have more campaign funding than you know what to do with! But if you finally do see that financial inequality is socially destructive, SAY so.
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The under-financed candidates should point out that whoever wins the Presidency will not have the option simply to increase private funding to run the country — that the Federal budget is not variable, so what matters is not that one candidate has 10 times as much money as another, but what a candidate can do with the SAME amount of money, because if Romney were to win the Presidency (which is not going to happen, of course; but let us, for this argument, say it could happen) he will not have 10 times the Federal budget to work with than would a President Santorum or President Gingrich, but the same, identical budget, so any monetary advantage in the campaign says NOTHING about his ability to govern with limited finances.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:06 PM links to this post

 
Drafts for a Book About Expansionism. I have made a start on writing a book (tentatively called "This Is the Plan") to set out the proposals and rationale for enlarging the United States geographically. Here is one section to appear early in the book.

Dynamic, Not Static

The main error opponents of Expansion into their own area make is in thinking that the unappealing traits they see in the United States of today would blight their own area. Canadians, for instance, say things like "We don't want the Radical Right in charge of our country" or "I don't want to lose my health coverage". What they don't realize is that the only way the Republicans could continue to have any power in an Expanded United States is if they continued to win a majority of the total vote of the entire Nation, as Expanded. And the only way they could do that is if they changed so much as to be unrecognizable as the plutocrats they are today.

That's the nice, inclusive way of putting it.

The less nice way of putting it is to say that the Republican Party would be wiped out as a political force, reduced to a permanent, feckless minority by the votes of millions of liberals from new States. If Canada had been part of the United States in the year 2000, George Bush would never have been elected, there would never have been an Iraq war, the Federal budget would have remained in surplus and the national debt reduced; the bankruptcy laws would never have been "reformed" to trap people in debt; Social Security would not be under threat; and other negative impacts upon the Nation and world would never have happened.

More, far from losing their own universal health coverage, Canadians would have joined with American liberals to give the United States a working universal healthcare program that fixed the defects of the Canadian system and gave everyone a much better system. Free trade would be evaluated much more critically, and the Expanded United States would require improvements in wages and hours, worker rights, healthcare, environmental protection, and working conditions as preconditions to free trade with low-wage areas.

U.S. policy in the Middle East would be much more balanced, as would empower the U.S. to be a true "honest broker", for not taking sides.

The Expanded U.S. would use its power much more for the positive than the negative, with increased development aid and greater support for emerging democracies.

In area after area, the Accession of Canada to the Union would so thoroughly transform the United States for the better that the Expanded U.S. would act very differently at home and abroad, not because we would become Greater Canada, tho in a sense we would, but because the forces of regression and progress are so evenly balanced in the United States today, with a slight tilt to regression, that the addition of even a few million progressive votes would utterly transform the Nation according to principles that half the Nation really believe in and the other half merely pretends allegiance to, things like equality and opportunity for all. Canada offers us not a few million progressive votes, but over 20 million!

With such a new electorate, dominantly Liberal, the plutocrats and radical libertarians among us would be very hard pressed to oppose progress toward equality and opportunity. The "I've got mine; you just try to get yours!" crowd would be exposed in its indecent selfishness and pretty much forced to go along with transformation of society to extend to everyone the good life they want to keep tightly to themselves. They might even be ennobled by a chastening disaster at the polls, and the resulting change in the direction of society, as people who have near-death experiences sometimes change their entire approach to life, going from miserly, selfish, and abusive, to open-hearted and open-handed.

There could be no greater error than to see the Expanded United States as a simple extension of the bad things that now characterize the Nation. Expansion will inevitably transform the Nation in many ways, mostly for the better, and mostly right away, as soon as representatives and Senators from new States are seated.

The addition of any area will likely improve the Nation far more than drag it down, for putting more human and physical resources at our disposal and adding more brains and "new blood" to the leadership. That goes even for a small addition, like Puerto Rico, whose 4 million Hispanics would hugely increase the Hispanic vote in Congress and for President. All Puerto Rican adults are eligible to vote, for having been born citizens, whereas a very large portion of the Latino population elsewhere in the Nation is ineligible to vote, for having been born abroad and not yet become citizens of the United States.

Once Puerto Rico is a state, with or without the U.S. Virgin Islands at the beginning, it could serve as a base for a wider Caribbean state, such that if the British Virgin Islands, Dominican Republic, St. Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, Barbados, the Cayman Islands, or any other insular Caribbean nation, the Bahamas, Belize, or Guyana were later to express interest in joining the Union, they could be joined with Puerto Rico in a wider Caribbean State as would ease their integration into the Nation and give cohesion to Caribbean development.

If Canada joins the Union, the forces of liberalism will triumph immediately, and the Nation's best self will immediately come to the fore. Quebec and Acadia's Francophones would give us a cordial and influential connection to La Francophonie, the wide community of speakers of French around the world.

If Britain joins the Union, the U.S. becomes not only a Liberal country in perpetuity, which Canadian accession would also guarantee, but also a hugely more powerful country for having absorbed a great power with all its human, educational, economic, and military resources, and web of connections with the ruling class of many countries of the former British Empire who still look toward London with affection and have intimate interconnections with British politics and economics.

The Accession of almost any country would make the United States more Liberal and outward-looking, since the United States is one of the most conservative societies on Earth. There are, of course, conservative governments and regressive ruling classes in some countries. Rightwing dictatorships do exist in many parts of this planet. But American conservatives would be embarrassed to make common cause with them upon Annexation. Compared to the Papa Docs and Somozas of the world, American conservatives are the good guys, devoted to retaining the wisdom of the past and the personal liberties, not just property, handed down as indispensable parts of the Western tradition. It would, indeed, be salutary for American conservatives to compare themselves to rightwing dictatorships in order to see how their own principles, carried too far, can be ruinous.

Accession of Mexico is the test here. Mexico talks the talk of a progressive nation, but is fundamentally regressive and repressive both governmentally and socially. Mexico is slave to tradition and socially immobile. What your father was, you will be, whether you like it or not. The ruling class hasn't even seen it as essential to electrify rural areas or provide sewage treatment or even septic tanks for all its people, nor even safe drinking water to all Mexican families. American conservatives cannot countenance such mistreatment of the common man but would be forced by embarrassment into distancing themselves from such cavalier reservation of the good things in life to the few and fortunate. American conservatives would understand that there is an enormous amount of money to be made in electrifying rural Mexico, and building the sewage systems, water systems, schools and roads and everything else poor Mexicans need, using a poorly paid workforce to wrack up huge profits for American developers. They could even generously raise wages and provide generous benefits — by Mexican standards — yet still clear a fortune, all the while pretending that their mercenary self-serving is actually altruism more than enlightened self-interest.

Social conservatives would be powerfully reinforced by the conservative Catholicism of much of Mexico. (Mexico can surprise you, tho. Consider that the Federal District of Mexico City legalized same-sex marriage long before most of the United States.) Of course, anti-Catholic bigots among Protestant conservatives would have to put aside their "anti-papist" inclinations or miss out on sharing in the new power of social conservatism. American social liberals might fear for the agenda that Mexican Catholics would favor, but poor Mexicans are conservative in part because they don't see the world as holding out much promise for themselves or their children. Once opportunities explode in front of their eyes, many Mexicans will cast aside the restraints their ancestors lived with. And of course the dominant rhetoric of Mexican politics has long been leftist. In Mexico, with its 110 million and more people, the American conservative movement has its best chance of retaining influence, but even there (and in regard to the Annexation of other Latin American countries and the Philippines), it is only social conservatism that stands much chance, because the needs for economic transformation are so great that capitalism without government activism is unlikely to suffice.

The decision American conservatives have to make as regards Expansion is between economic self-interest and security, on the one hand, and retention of the upper hand in domestic U.S. politics. Expansion would entail so much economic growth and increase the power of the United States so much that worries about the rise of foreign challengers (the EU, China, India) would subside. Mexico alone would constitute a virtually inexhaustible supply of volunteers for the military as would guarantee a supremely powerful defense against all dangers into the very long-term future. In any economic upswing, the rich will do better than the rest of society, for the simple reason that "it takes money to make money". So any massive increase in national wealth will be accompanied by a massive increase in the private wealth of the presently well-off. Counterbalancing that will be a probable increase in taxation to fund development of badly underdeveloped areas of the Expanded Nation. But what do you care if your taxes rise by 10% but your net worth rises 20%? (Those are just sample figures; the exact ratio is unpredictable, but it is certain that, tho a rising tide raises all boats, it almost invariably seems to raise yachts higher and faster than dinghies or fishing boats.)

India is another case in point. India is libertarianism gone mad. The "I've got mine; you just try to get yours!" crowd has controlled India for thousands of years, holding all the good things in life closely to their own chest, and using superstition to keep the poor down. They even labeled some people "untouchable" and structured social and political institutions to keep society rigidly structured into hierarchical classes from which they could not rise (or fall). American conservatives would be loath to side with continuation of a caste system in India, much less its institution here — even tho the American Radical Right has many of the same basic feelings about the poor that the top of Indian society has. Indian Brahmins are forthright in their disdain for the poor, and let themselves feel good about the plight of the miserable by occasional charity in the form of "alms", and pronouncements that it is "the will of God" that some are mighty and rich while others are powerless and poor — because if one accepts one's place with grace, and lives virtuously in "this life", then you will be rewarded in "the next life" with a better social and economic station. American conservatives would be embarrassed into disowning such attitudes by another principle of our civilization, that a person should be allowed to rise as high as his talents might take him.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:20 PM links to this post

 
A Few Brief Remarks. I left some comments at news stories at the Huffington Post on AOL today, on different topics. Here are three:

We need to ABOLISH tipping altogether, by law, and build a reasonable service fee into the bill, as ALL CIVILIZED countries do. Tipping is petty BRIBERY that is unfair to everyone. It extorts money from people who receive bad service [but] are intimidated away from giving less than the going rate -- which has in recent years been inflated from 10% to 15% for no reason. And it leaves servers at the mercy of cheapskates like "Mr 1%". To enforce the prohibition on tipping, we need merely provide that all tips left at the table are GOVERNMENT PROPERTY, and pocketing that money for private purposes is a FEDERAL CRIME, punishable by a fine of 10X the amount stolen, and by imprisonment for egregious violations. Then use the tip money, sent to the Government via business-tax returns or quarterly tip checks, for anti-poverty programs. We can also abolish the exemption from the minimum wage for servers, and establish a reasonable minimum wage that takes into account the 10% or 15% service fee. Any raiding of the service fee by the owners of the establishment would be punished, again, by a fine 10X the amount misappropriated, plus imprisonment for egregious violations.
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If you don't know the sleazy things that SOUTHERN states are doing to suppress the Democratic vote, educate yourself. In many rural areas of the South, a significant portion of the black population was born at home, thru midwives, so did not have birth certificates, so requirements that they present a government-issued birth certificate, with no substitute documentation, such as affidavits, school records, etc., are NOT good-faith attempts to prevent voter fraud, which is in any case rare. Most REGISTERED voters don't even vote.
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Churches are NOT businesses. They do not make profits. Only PROFITS are taxed. The U.S. IS a democracy, but not a theocracy. No church can be attacked for expressing moral views or favoring one candidate or party. Cannot be done under the Constitution: First Amendment -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". What part of that don't you understand? Government may not restrict freedom of speech, be it by an individual, a pastor, or a church as an official statement of policy. Opposing a political STANCE is NOT running a campaign, and in fact NO CHURCH has ever been taxed for speaking out on political issues. Nor could it be, because that would constitute "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. You may not like freedom of religion, but it is an indispensable part of American civilization, without which we would have endless, bloody, civil war after war after war.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM links to this post

 
GOP vs. POP. The best people in this country are Liberals, and mostly Democrats. The tuffest and nastiest people, alas, are Radical Rightists and Republicans. It would be the easiest thing in the world for an American Hitler to recruit a new SA or SS from among the Radical Right, who would gladly beat, stab, and shoot their fellow Americans to get their way, rationalizing that they must never hesitate to do whatever may be necessary to "save America". Liberals would never do such things except in the extreme event of an absolute, inescapable need to defend themselves and save the Nation from descent into barbarism. But decent people can be pushed only so far before they fite back. The First Confederacy found that out when they bombarded Fort Sumter. What will it take for Liberals to take all necessary steps to crush the Second Confederacy, the present-day conspiracy of Tea Partiers, Radical Libertarians, militias, and Radical Rightists who want to undo all the progress of the last century?
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The Democrats are the party of compromise beyond all principle, of accommodation that has gone over to capitulation. Democrats are, in short, the Party Of Pussies (in the sense "ineffectual or timid person[s]"). In a contest between the brazenly savage GOP and the endlessly apologetic, timorous POP, which will win — every time?
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Democrats need to find their backbone and show the same militancy for principle that the Radical Right has shown for tribe. Because it doesn't matter if Democrats win the White House and both houses of Congress by large majorities — as they did in 2008 — if they will never crush the barbarians of the Radical Right under hobnailed boots. A party of MEN who do not compromise away the good and decent to accommodate evil and indecency, needs only a small majority to do what the people elected them to do. And the very first thing the new Congress must do is ABOLISH the unconstitutional and immoral filibuster rule, Senatorial "holds", and every other antidemocratic perversion that evil men have intruded to frustrate the intent of the Framers of the Constitution that both houses of Congress always operate by simple majority (save for a tiny number of exceptions spelled out expressly in the text of the Constitution). Then the floodgates will open, and the people's work will be done in a flash, with the greatest of ease.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM links to this post

 
Greatest Generation, Your Ass! Brian Williams, anchor of NBC Nitely News, ticked me off again tonite in talking nonsense about the "Greatest Generation". I sent the following email to NBC News, about its appalling lack of perspective.

Kindly STOP using the preposterous term "Greatest Generation" to refer to the Great Depression-WWII generation. If you truly believe that these people, who SUFFERED misfortune not of their choosing, is greater in any way whatsoever than the generation that CREATED the United States, and CHOSE the hardships they endured for our sake and the sake of this benighted planet, there is something seriously wrong with you. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, Adams, and on and on and on, have no peer in that 20th Century generation. The latter wrote NONE of our basic documents and created NOTHING in the way of the basic structure and culture of this Nation. They are NOT the "Greatest Generation". They're not even the SECOND-greatest, which term must surely apply to the 19th Century generation that held the Union together and abolished slavery, at huge personal cost. STOP using Tom Brokaw's IDIOTIC term. It was NEVER right, NEVER justified, and always INSULTING to the Founders of this Republic.

The generation that Brokaw stupidly calls the greatest, had disasters befall them. They didn't intend to suffer the world's worst Depression, nor its worst war. Those disasters just happened to them, and they struggled to survive. None of them volunteered to be crushed by the defects of laissez-faire capitalism. And the bulk of the soldiers who fought WWII were conscripted — drafted. Pehaps as few as 1/3 volunteered, and only 73% of the U.S. military in WWII served abroad.
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By contrast, every single Revolutionary War soldier volunteered. Every single one (including one of my ancestors). And the war came home to them.
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Does anyone on Earth think that our parents/grandparents (whatever) embraced the Depression? Do you think they WANTED to be thrown out of work and reduced to penury, then drafted to be sent thousands of miles from home to fite in hell? If they had asked to be laid off, for the sake of building their character, or volunteered to be cannon fodder in Europe or the Pacific, that would be one thing. They did not. Nor did they accomplish anything like the changes at home that the Civil War generation or the 60s generation did. So let us never heard "the Greatest Generation" in Tom Brokaw's sense again. Ever.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:51 PM links to this post

 
Time for Sanctions against Russia and China. The former dipoles of the Communist world conspiracy, Moscow and Beijing, have become obstinate advocates of barbarism, this time in vetoing UN action on Syria. It's time they paid the price for their inexcusably monstrous behavior. We should move to strip them of their vetoes, as the first shot over their bows. Once that motion is itself vetoed, we must move to the really powerful guns to blast them out of the water: trade embargoes.
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China is wholly dependent upon exports to keep its people from starving, then rising in revolution against the regime. Ditto Russia.
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Russia's main exports of importance are oil and gas, and Europe has become hooked on Russian suppliers. But there's plenty of oil and gas in the world, and Europe can free itself from its dangerous dependency on a country that is teetering on the edge of dictatorship or revolt.
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The U.S. and EU can cripple China any time they want, simply by imposing restrictions on imports from Communist China, starting with the goods sent thru the most abusively unfair trading practices. We can also demand that China let its currency rise or fall on the world market, and stop artificially keeping its value low to give unfair advantage to Chinese manufacturers. So we'd be fiting two abuses at the same time.
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The U.S. acting alone can cause China huge problems. Already, the U.S. recession has produced considerable suffering among Chinese manufacturers, without any willful intent on our part. If we can harm China indeliberately, think of what we can do deliberately.
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Russia and China are committing hostile acts in the realm of cyber warfare against the U.S. and other countries, and we should warn them in unmistakable terms that we will not consent to have them ramp up their misdeeds in preparation for any kind of war, be it cyber, economic, or military, but regard the behavior of their regimes as provocative, and worthy of countermeasures from the U.S. We should remind Russia of what happened to the Soviet Union when it went up against us and our system of alliances, and caution them that we may be able to break up the Russian Federation as much as we did the Soviet empire. We need not merely promote democracy. We can promote regional separatism.
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We should publicly and covertly work to strengthen Russian democracy and oust Vladimir Putin from all positions of influence in Russian society.
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We should publicly and covertly work to promote democracy in China, and force elections not just at the local level but also at the national level — real elections, for real change from a real opposition that we will support not just thru rhetoric but also thru monetary contributions, and educational and technical assistance in organizing a popular democracy. China has separatist movements we can support too. And its leaders know full well what happened to the Soviet Union.
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Russia and China are the mainstays of barbarism in our time. Their support for the worst dictators on Earth must be broken — indeed smashed. If the people now in power in Moscow and Beijing will not stop their monstrous behavior, then we should do everything in our substantial power to oust their leaderships.
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We have nothing to fear from doing so. China's military is already preparing for military war against us, and the civilian leadership has not stopped the military from pursuing those plans. If we are to have war against Communist China, it is better for us if it comes sooner rather than later, inasmuch as China's trade surpluses — from us! — are turned over to the military to prepare for war against us. We cannot be naive about this. We must strengthen the forces of democracy in China, which are as well the forces for peace and for stripping the military of its excessive power.
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People who fear China will dump its U.S. treasury bonds and such needn't worry. There will be other buyers, friendlier buyers. And if there are not buyers for existing bonds, China cannot unload them and thus cannot cause us harm. Concern about Communists in China dictating policy to the United States because of the mess the Republicans have put us into in refusing to raise taxes on the rich, can be used to crack the whip over the Republican Right and FORCE them to raise taxes on the rich, as the only way to re-establish our economic independence from Communist China. Breaking the back of Russian and Chinese barbarism could be a win-win: for the United States, and for the people of those miserable countries.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:05 PM links to this post