An Essay, by Paul Cottage, on the U.S. Elections 2012

I am writing this essay in light of the elections that are coming up. The importance of the leadership of the United States and therefore these elections cannot be understated. Please post the link to this web page on your social media site.

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government” Thomas Jefferson, 1789

Can the American people be trusted with the most powerful and influential government in the world?

Currently, there is no society who’s people are well informed enough that they can be trusted with their own governance. At least that is the view of most of humanity because there is no society whose authority is entrusted to the dictates of its own people. At best, there are a number of societies that have nominal representation by usually ill informed and impotent people.

Greece and Italy are two cases in point. The duly elected leadership in both of these countries, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and George Papandreou in Greece, have been removed from power and replaced with what the media describes as “Technocrats”. Given the financial and political crisis faced by both of these countries, these outcomes may have been appropriate, but the people, in either country, were not involved in the decision. And many would argue rightfully so…

What about the people and political leadership of the United States, can they be trusted with the governance of the most powerful country in the world? Obviously, my opinion is no, and many would agree with this view. This essay explores the validity and ramifications of our current political system.

Scientists believe that over the next 40 years, humans will create more knowledge than we have created in all of our current existence.

We are struggling to address the consequences of the advances we have already made. We have a global population of over 7 billion people. As a species, we produce far more than we can ever hope to consume in the west, but child slave labourers in countries such as India do much of this over production.  More people go to bed hungry than the combined population of the United States, Canada and the European Union and most of these people work seven days a week. There is no correlation between how hard we work or how educated we are, and how much money we make - As the salaries of most corporate CEOs confirm. If we live in a society that values equity why does this continue?

We have a global financial crisis, not because there is a shortage of wealth, but because of global financial in-balances, and our over exploitation of our eco-system is leading to consequences, which we cannot comprehend, or control.

We are now 100% dependant on science and technology to support our ever-expanding populations. How can we hope to address the issues we face with our current technological advances, let alone the unforeseen advances of the next 40 years, if most of our policymakers are totally ignorant of the sciences and our dependency upon them? Less than 2% of our congressional representation has a science background. 96% of our republican representation believes that global warming is just scare mongering.

How do these people, that are so unqualified to address the issues we face, get elected? I go back to:-

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government” Thomas Jefferson, 1789

We should explore the founding principles upon which the United States was built.

Although our forefathers lacked a lot of the scientific knowledge available to even schoolchildren today, they did understand the limitations of an ill-informed populace, and divisiveness of governance by an unrepresentative few.

Contrary to what many would have us believe, the US was not founded as a Christian nation. To believe anything other than the prevailing Christian view three hundred years ago in Europe was against the law. The early settlers of the United States were Puritans looking for freedom from authoritarian Christianity.

As was the cultural norm of the educated in Europe, these puritans studied the bible, but they did so in light of natural law (the sciences), which they also held to be God’s law too. The majority of members of the Royal Society were Puritans. This included Sir Isaac Newton. The Royal Society is the oldest scientific academy, and has always been a fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists.

The principles enshrined in documents such as the “Declaration of Independence” drafted 1776, the initial “Constitution of the United States” drafted in 1787, were deeply influenced by the written views of scientists and philosophical thinkers such as Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and David Hume. These people valued knowledge based upon deductive reasoning not superstition or opinion.

The founding fathers of the United States envisioned a secular government that respected and tolerated differing views; a society in which its members gained knowledge about reality or truth using deductive reason; a society in which no political leader, King, or pope could gain greater authority than the ordinary citizen.

Whole organizations and operations funded by taxpayer dollars now exist that operate completely outside the law and values of our society.

So what went wrong?

Science, or critical thinking, always creates new knowledge that requires the refinement of our ethical views and challenges both political and economic vested interests.

The arduous campaign to abolish the slave trade 250 years ago is a good example. The majority of people who used sugar to sweeten their tea and cakes had no idea of the human cost involved in producing the sugar. There were political and economic vested interests to ensure continued ignorance, and anyone that spoke out against the exploitation was ostracized. Superstition or opinion (i.e. slaves were thought of as sub-human) also helped to maintain the status quo.

Today, we only have to turn the television on to become aware of unethical activities by those with political and economic vested interests.

So why do we maintain such an inequitable Status Quo today?

Perhaps Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister for Armaments, summed up the main contributing factors during his testimony at the Nuremberg trails.

“Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought” In other words, “Dittoheads”.

Probably one of the most powerful vested interest groups that is manipulating our politicians are the energy companies. As an example, between January 2009 and June 2010 they spent half a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation. They spent an additional estimated 73 million dollar on anti-clean energy advertising campaign though October 2010.

We should be proud of Obama’s brave stand against the energy companies when he rejected a major new pipeline that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands into the United States in spite of a great deal of negativism from Republicans and the thread of oil industry to wreak electoral revenge in this years elections.

If Humanity is going to survive it’ll be with sustainable and non-polluting energy sources.

News and what should be “fact based” television programming panders to economic vested interests. These programs, which should be informative, have to compete for entertainment value so they’ve become emotional and opinionated. Reality is of secondary importance. Investigative journalism has become too expensive for cash focused newsrooms.

As White house correspondent David Gregory put it when questioned about why he didn’t push George W. Bush on his lack of a rationale for going to war in Iraq he answered:- “It’s not our role…”

As we all know it requires a lot of money to win a congressional seat, and those with economic vested interests want to ensure the right types of people get elected. Most of our congressionally elected representatives are lawyers. Lawyers are trained to win arguments. As any trial lawyer will tell you, that means using facts selectively for the purpose of winning, and NOT to establish the truth. Ideology and rhetoric dominate U.S. politics with little relationship to factual reality, and often a great deal of bigoted superstitious ignorance.

Examples of ignorant bigoted views include:-

“The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax” Michele Bachmann – Republican candidate

“Evolution is a theory that is out there, and its got some gaps” Education in school should be biblically based, and sex education should be based on abstinence – Rick Perry – Texas Governor and republican candidate

Former house speaker Newt Gingrich tells voters that embryonic stem cell research is “killing children in order to have research materials”

Herman Cain claims there is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is anything other than a personal choice.

It’s not just republicans that promote views with no scientific basis, Democrats passed an ordinance requiring “cell phone” shops to warn customers about radiation hazards such as brain cancer despite no scientific evidence.

Anyone that is following the debates on Iran (this excludes most Americans) should be aware that an influential Washington constituency supporting leading Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are eager for war with Iran.

Based on the recent Rhetoric from David Cameron on Iran(while he was in Saudi Arabia) and the great pride that Cameron took in Britain’s military part in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, we can be sure that Britain will be right behind any U.S. led invasion on Iran.

Of course the vast amount of oil in Iran has nothing to do with the decision making process, and the ten-of-thousands of lives that will be lost are a sacrifice our politicians are willing to make.

“The people” can influence the political landscape, as Wikipedia’s website blackout to raise awareness of the American media industry efforts through congress, to pass laws for control over the Internet has recently demonstrated.

 BUT “the people” have to get involved. Otherwise our politicians will continue to secretly pass laws and make decisions in the interests of Corporate America (because its Corporate American that funds their election campaign) and we can kiss the interests of the American people (and humanity) goodbye.

What does this mean? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. History is full of examples of this. Politicians and a populace that lack any real capacity for critical thinking, will use nationalism, or religion or some other ideological diarrhea to spread mass fear and mistrust, and, from history, we know the results.