The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: - The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals
Table of Contents
 
Introduction                                                                                                                                                 1
Acknowledgements                                                                                                                                   6
Prologue – What is Wrong with the United States of America?                                               7

Part I – Root Causes of the Impending Demise of American Democracy                         12
Chapter 1 – Legalized Bribery of Government Officials                                                            14
Chapter 2 – Human Psychological Factors                                                                                    29
Chapter 3 – Corporatocracy                                                                                                                50
Chapter 4 – Corporate Control of Communications Media                                                     61
Chapter 5 – Corrupt Election System                                                                                               76
Chapter 6 – Government Secrecy and Shadow Government                                                  89
Chapter 7 – American Exceptionalism & Unmentionable Things in US Politics          105

Part II – A Sampling of Imperialist Actions in U.S. History                                                  123
Chapter 8 – Slavery and its Legacy                                                                                                  124
Chapter 9 – Early U.S. Expansion and Imperialism                                                                  138
Chapter 10 – U.S. Imperialism during the Cold War                                                                 150
Chapter 11 – The Iraq War and Occupation                                                                                  166
Chapter 12 – The Afghanistan War and our Denial of Habeas Corpus                                189

Part III – Consequences                                                                                                                        199
Chapter 13 – The Election of George W. Bush as our President                                            200
Chapter 14 – War and Imperialism                                                                                                   205
Chapter 15 – Income and Wealth Inequality and Class Warfare                                          220
Chapter 16 – The Predator Financial Class                                                                                    238
Chapter 17 – Shock Therapy: Economic Shenanigans on the World Stage                      259
Chapter 18 – Contempt for International Law                                                                             271
Chapter 19 – The “War on Drugs” and the Prison Industry                                                    283
Chapter 20 – Climate Change                                                                                                              305
Chapter 21 – “War on Terror”                                                                                                             328
Chapter 22 – Health Care                                                                                                                      352
Chapter 23 – Unaccountable government                                                                                    366
Chapter 24 – Failed Response to and Investigation of the 9/11 Attacks                          380
Epilogue                                                                                                                                                       392

About the Author                                                                                                                                     402
References                                                                                                                                                   403





INTRODUCTION
 
The story of the founding of our nation involves a stark mix of greatness combined with tragedy and failure. On the one hand, the sentiments expressed in our founding document still serve today, more than two and a quarter centuries after they were written, as a blueprint for the most moral system of government among humans that was ever written. But on the other hand, subsequent events deviated so much from the ideals expressed in the American Declaration of Independence that the whole endeavor has always been surrounded by dark shadows. Though improvements were subsequently made that ameliorated those dark shadows, they still exist to this day.
            The Americans who are of greatest value to our country are those who seek to bring the reality of America closer to its promise – or highest ideals. These people stand in stark contrast to those who constantly proclaim the “greatness of America”, without recognizing the need to improve their country by seeking to close the gap between its ideals and its reality. Those people contribute much more to our problems than to the solutions to our problems.
            The Declaration of Independence that founded the United States of America on July 4, 1776, is basically a proclamation against tyranny.  It proclaims that all of humanity – not just Americans, but all of humanity – has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Then it justifies the creation of our nation by noting that it is the purpose of government to secure the inalienable rights of its citizens, and that government derives its legitimacy only from the consent of those whom it governs.  Therefore, whenever a government becomes destructive of that purpose, it is the moral right of its citizens to abolish that government and construct another in its place.
            Notwithstanding the lofty sentiments and purpose of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the reality did not then – and still has not – lived up to its ideal.  Most obvious in this regard was the institution of slavery, which in some respects made a mockery of the sentiments expressed in our Declaration.  Yet, it was a great start, and it served then – as it still does – to shine as a beacon of hope for our infant nation, and the rest of the world as well. 
 
 
The dark side of the United States of America
 
Since its founding, the actions of the United States of America during its almost two and a half centuries of existence, like most if not all the other nations of the world, contain a mixture of good and bad – actions noble and ignoble.  Yet most written histories of the United States emphasize the good things while overlooking much of the bad.  This is especially true of the teaching of U.S. history to students. 
            In that respect the United States is probably not much different from other nations and cultures of the world.  Most or all nations and cultures have a strong tendency to describe their histories and current actions in an exaggerated favorable light.  In that way they attempt to elicit the cooperation or enthusiastic participation of their members or citizens.  If people believe that their nation’s goals are noble and inspiring they will be inclined to cooperate with those goals willingly.  Many of them will even willingly risk their lives by going to war in order to further the goals of their nation.  Even many of those who don’t fully believe in the nobility of their nation’s goals will be moved by peer pressure to willingly fight for them.  Obtaining the willing cooperation and enthusiastic participation of its citizens in furthering their goals is almost always far preferable to a nation’s leaders than trying to obtain that cooperation by force.  
Most people prefer it this way.  Doing and believing what they are told by their leaders is easier than developing their own beliefs and plotting their own independent course of action based on an independent assessment of the value of what they are advised to do.  Furthermore, in following the prodding of their leaders, people can make themselves feel that they are acting “patriotically”.  It helps to give them a sense of identity, feel a connection to their fellow citizens and feel good about themselves.    
            But there are very important downsides to this kind of relationship between a nation and its citizens.  The “noble” actions portrayed by the leaders may not be noble at all.  Instead, they may be– and often are – designed for the enrichment and private satisfaction of the leaders.  They may – and often do – have terrible consequences for hundreds, thousands, or millions of other people, including those whose participation in their goals they endeavor to elicit.  In short, nations can – and often have – evolved into tyranny. 
            The end result can be that a nation’s leaders create a system in which masses of people are led around and manipulated like sheep – all for the benefit of the leaders, at the great expense of everyone else.  The sheep see themselves as benefiting because they are spared the necessity of doing the hard work of thinking for themselves, and because they are manipulated into feeling good about themselves.  
            But just as an individual cannot grow if he is unwilling to recognize his faults, a nation cannot improve if its citizens are unwilling to look at and seriously consider the dark side of their nation’s history and current actions.  It may be very painful for some to do that.  But it is necessary in order to facilitate the development of a nation that works for the benefit of all its citizens rather than exclusively for its leaders. 
 
 
Politicians against historians – The attack on “National Standards for United States History”

A great example of how politically difficult it is to challenge the standard feel good stories told about our country is the U.S. Senate’s unanimous vote, in 1995, in favor of rejecting the proposed National Standards for United States History, by a vote of 99-1 (The one vote against the resolution was cast because the Senator felt that the resolution wasn’t strong enough.)

Creation of the standards

The standards were produced by a policy-setting body called the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), consisting of the presidents of nine major organizations and twenty-two other nationally recognized administrators, historians, and teachers, and two taskforces of teachers in World and United States history, with substantial input from thirty-one national organizations. The document was created through an unprecedented process of open debate, multiple reviews, and the active participation of the largest organizations of history educators in the nation.
            In November 1994, NCHS released its document, which was meant to provide purely voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12. As explained by Gary Nash, who led the effort, these standards were meant to have one thing in common: “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools.” Their signature features were said to include “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”.
 
Controversy over the standards

Critics focused largely on two main issues: Multiculturalism and so-called “political correctness”. As an example, here is one article which derogatorily refers to the “multi-cultis” who it is claimed wrote the document to advance their “politically correct” and radically left point of view. Lynn Cheney aggressively criticized the document as containing “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, “a politicized history”, and a disparaging of the West. Other major critics of the document included Newt Gingrich and Republican presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole. Dole blamed the document on “the embarrassed to be American crowd” of “intellectual elites”. With regard to the criticisms of “grimness and gloominess”, Nash had this to say:
 
To be sure, it is not possible to recover the history of women, African Americans, religious minorities, Native Americans, laboring Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans without addressing issues of conflict, exploitation, and the compromising of the national ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation… To this extent, the standards counseled a less self-congratulatory history of the United States and a less triumphalist Western Civilization orientation toward world history.
      Reduced to its core, the controversy thus turned on how history can be used to train up the nation's youth. Almost all of the critics of the history standards argued that young Americans would be better served if they study the history presented before the 1960s, when allegedly liberal and radical historians "politicized" the discipline and abandoned an "objective" history in favor of pursuing their personal political agendas.

Nash then discusses the historians’ point of view:
 
On the other side of the cultural divide stands a large majority of historians. For many generations, even when the profession was a guild of white Protestant males of the upper class, historians have never regarded themselves as anti-patriots because they revise history or examine sordid chapters of it. Indeed, they expose and critique the past in order to improve American society and to protect dearly won gains… This is not a new argument. Historians have periodically been at sword's point with vociferous segments of the public, especially those of deeply conservative bent.
 
So why then did the U.S. Senate unanimously reject these standards?  Well, the last thing our leaders want is for our children to be taught a “grim and gloomy portrayal” of American History, as Lynn Cheney described the Standards.  There were probably some U.S. Senators who appreciated the value of these standards – as they voted to reject them.  But they knew that failing to vote with their colleagues to reject them would be greatly frowned upon by the powers that be and result in their being targeted for a political hatchet job and even political extermination.  A system for teaching history to school children that rocks the boat by questioning the motives of our great leaders or the unarguable and permanent “greatness” of our nation is just too threatening to our nation’s leaders to be allowed to exist. 
 
 
The purpose of this book
 
My purpose in writing this book is to encourage my fellow American citizens to think more about the dark side of their nation’s history, current policies and current directions – in the belief that this is the surest way to make us better than who we are today.   
            Our history has been a mixture of wise and stupid, moral and immoral actions.  Yet, most Americans are led to believe that we are so far superior to the other peoples of the world that we have the moral right to force them to do whatever we believe to be in our best interests – which we claim to be in the best interests of everyone.  Such an attitude is arrogant, hypocritical and dangerous in the extreme.    
            Worse, we are moving swiftly in the wrong direction.  A minority of very wealthy and powerful people – an elite oligarchy – has concentrated more and more power and wealth into their own hands, and they continue to do so.  In the midst of the worst economic crisis our country has known since the Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of thousands of Americans die every year because they can’t afford decent health care, millions lose their homes, and millions are driven into poverty, while those institutions and individuals responsible for the crisis make record profits and take home multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses. 
            To distract us from the true cause of our crises, the oligarchy tries to turn us against each other.  As I begin to write this book, the Governor of Wisconsin is attempting to demonize and destroy the public employees unions in his state.  This is one part of an ongoing war against American labor unions – one of the last bastions of hope for the working people of our country. 
    
 
In summary
 
The problems facing our country and the world are enormous.  Unfortunately, we are now at a time in U.S. history when anti-democratic forces in our country are expanding, leading to the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, as our nation’s previously robust middle class continues to shrink and become more and more insecure.  In many respects this represents a vicious downward cycle.  The more power accumulated by the oligarchy, the more power they have to accumulate more power and successfully demand the passage of legislation that adds still more to their increasing power and wealth. 
 
One important key – perhaps the most important key – to breaking and reversing this downward vicious cycle lies in an accumulating awareness by the American people about the true nature of the roots of their nation’s problems (Part I), its history (Part II), and the current status and nature of their most pressing problems (Part III).  Finding ways to facilitate this task is one of the greatest and most important challenges of the 21 Century.