The Ugly Un-American: Submitting to an International Test

Posted by Ray Church on 08.08.2007

With every American and (almost literally) his dog getting to participate in the YouTube presidential debates, Ray Church chimes in this week with questions that matter to the five and three quarter billion people who do not get to participate in the US elections... 8 Questions for the candidates from an international perspective.

Readers tend to forget that I'm not from the U.S. This is especially true of my critics, who usually prelude their letters with something like "How can you call yourself American?". My favourite critic was the one who, after I wrote my column on Jerry Felwell, felt the need to give me some advice. "If you're such a great American", he started, "why don't you get a bunch of people to follow you".

So when I get accused of partisanship I tend to laugh it off. Every so often I realize that others don't quite get the joke. Every so often I realize that my view of American politics is outside the box.

Or more properly, American politics is outside my box. And not just my box, but most of the world. Hillary Clinton still gets props for her answers to questions on foreign policy, for example. In the first Democratic debate, she scored big points for crying "Havok" and promising to let loose the dogs of war. When Obama tried to follow suit this week, he got lambasted not because he would be breaking with International Law but because he would be attacking an ally. Obama gets dumped on because he vows not to use nuclear weapons, but the central lie… uhhh, reason given for ousting Saddam Hussein was the idea that he might be reconstituting his nuclear program.

I was similarly interested when Dan Carlin recently attempted to explain the importance of the constitution to such ignoramuses as I. (You can find that episode marked Centum, if you want to listen at home). While Carlin is a worth while listen and an interesting perspective, in this case he misses the point. The constitution is a good starting point for solving internal disputes, but America tends to view the rest of the world through their own internal lens.

The US can't understand how a Democratic country would elect Hamas as their representatives. The explanation this week for withholding aid to Palestine? We support Democracy but you have to be sensible about who you elect.

Good advice and America would be well served in applying that to themselves.

With all this in mind, I wondered what would happen if the rest of the world had a hand in selecting the U.S. president: what would we be asking of your next president? Why should the US public be the ones to judge the appropriateness of your foreign policy? We're the ones who are going to have to live with it.

With that in mind, I began to formulate 8 questions I would ask, as a foreigner, of America's officials.

Now, one quick point: If you have connections to one or another of the campaigns, and can get these questions to a candidate (with some way to verify that the answers actually come from the candidate) I would be more than happy to publish the answers here on 411…

OK, so I'm not holding my breath, but let's go ahead with this anyway.

1. Do you believe the U.S has a duty towards the United Nations, and what do you believe that duty is?

First up, let me admit I was wrong.

OK, pick your jaw up from the floor, I've got another shocker for you.

Enrique was right.

Enrique gave this very succinct evaluation of Ron Paul.

Isolationist libertarian extraordinaire

Ron Paul had a wonderful moment on the "Colbert Report when he was asked if he would defund different parts of America. Education department? Yes. Tax department? Yes. Then the biggie… the UN? Yes yes yes!

The thing is that America never pays its dues to the UN. They owe something like 1.3 billion US dollars. This, despite the fact that the United Nations, more often than not, gets used to enforce American unilateralism. One needs only look at the imbalance of the use of the veto power, which the US, followed by the UK, use far more often than any other nations with the veto.

Or you can listen to neo-con architects, like Francis "The End of History" Fukuyama, when they say things like "[the UN is] perfectly serviceable as an instrument of American unilateralism and indeed may be the primary mechanism through which that unilateralism will be exercised in the future". Bare in mind that this was written in 1992, and that the principle served the US well for much of the decade that followed.

In fact, it took a complete show of megalomania before America was unable to use the United Nations to such ends.

Which leads us to question 2.

2. Do you believe the US should be bound by International Laws?

This one goes beyond just George Bush by the way. Clinton continued to bomb Iraq through the late 90's, in defiance of United Nations treaties. George H. W. Bush invaded Panama under much protest from the United Nations, and if it weren't for veto power they would have been condemned by the Security Council.

And then we get to Reagan, the poster child for "screw the rest of the world" politics. If you don't the know list, there's Grenada, there's Iran and Iraq, there's Hondurus, there's El Salvador, and then there's Nicaragua itself which sued the US and won, only to have the US refuse to pay reparations.

So, I want to know if the next President will actually pay any attention to International Law, if it will be another four years of lip service to our face while you take the rest of the world from the other end.

3. Do you believe that America's interests are best served by maintaining U.S. hegemony?

About a month ago Newsweek published an editorial by Fareed Zakaria. The U.S. will be fine in the future, he argued, because they still control 30% of the World's GDP.

Now, I was in shock. This idea that America will be safer if it maintains its hegemony gets the whole thing ass backwards: America's endangered by its hegemony. Be it economic hegemony or military hegemony, America has to rethink its strategy with regards to the distribution of wealth and power. When other rogue states decide they want a nuclear program, their number one reason is their fear of America's nuclear program.

"But Ray, those nations are dangerous countries, and they have clear intentions of destroying other countries". How do you know? Because they say so? Bush threatens other nations all the time, sometimes by name and sometimes under vague monikers' like "countries that are a grave threat to freedom". I'm not saying that these countries are not seriously unhinged, but what differentiates those countries from the US?

"Ray, those Nations should work there way out of poverty. The reason they're poor is they don't work as hard as we Americans or there system isn't as good as America".

People who believe this, by the way, are called deluded. It means you know nothing about the push of US foreign policy for the last 50 years. It means you have never heard about such hideous concepts as odious debt. It means you basically have not been paying attention to the role of US corporations in the creation of world poverty. Which leads us to:

4. Do you believe that U.S. Corporations should be protected by the 14th Amendment?

I pondered how to ask this question for a long time. In the end, I went back to the beginning. You see for some reason the 14th amendment, originally created to protect the property rights of former slaves, was, sometime in the early 20th century, used to expand and empower corporations, to the point that they became regarded as legal persons in the eyes of the law. What makes this so dangerous is that while a person may be punished and incarcerated if they over steps their pursuit of happiness.

A corporation has no similar means of punishment.

What this has meant is that the corporation has become an instrument focused on one thing: the pursuit of profit; and it does so without any regard for common morality. While its effects on the US are egregious, the effect on third world countries is often unforgivable.

One needs look no further than Chiquita, the fruit company that makes most of its profits from exploiting South America. This week, Chiquita turned on the Bush Administration, saying that the Bush Administration gave no clear instructions as to what they should do about the right wing paramilitary groups that they were paying to enforce their control of resources in South America. They continued to do so for a year after the Bush Administration found out they were doing it because the Bush Administration didn't tell them to stop.

They couldn't see that simply funding paramilitary groups was itself a lapse of ethical clarity because it didn't figure into their bottom line.

Now this was an extreme case, but there are other, less violent examples that do just as much damage to poor communities. I mentioned odious debt earlier, which is the practice of creating interest on loans that poorer nations are never able to repay. They spend their entire time paying the interest and never able to pay the loans.

One way that the World Bank encourages these countries to rid themselves of this debt is to privatize their natural resources. There are plenty of examples of countries selling off their water supply or their native forests to pay off these debts, meaning that they may pay down their debt, but they lose valuable resources with which to create their own wealth.

Which gets me to…

5. What duty, if any, do you feel that the US owes to the countries which have been affected by its foreign policy over the past 50 years?

It struck me the other day, watching old video footage of Donald Rumsfeld before the Iraq invasion, that there was a very strange piece of thinking going on: "This is a country which will be able to pay for its own reconstruction?"

Imagine, after World War 2, if Germany demanded that France pay for its own reconstruction. I know, I know… there's a Hitler metaphor and that is certainly not playing fair, but think of that principle. The aggressor should be the one to pay for the rebuilding, right?

America, over the last 50 years, has consistently ducked its responsibility of paying for the damage it has done. Look at the parts of Vietnam still violently affected by America's use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. (And while I'm on this, noticed that America used chemical warfare after such things were outlawed and is still the only nation to use an atomic bomb against another nation).

So, what reparations should be paid to these countries, be it Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama or Iraq? How can the US atone for its excesses?

6. What duty, if any, does the US have towards its indigenous (Native Americans, Native Hawaiians) population?

OK, it may not seem immediately obvious why a foreigner would care about this question, other than a basic concern for all humans. The issue of indigenous rights and the aftermath of colonization is one of the big unspoken issues which affect the globe.

(While we're at it, let's throw in the role of America's protectorates, such as Puerto Rico and Saipan which get all of the economic exploitation that American companies can offer with few of the legal protections)

America's unacknowledged role as an empire and colonizing force has never been addressed. Native Americans as a minority are more impoverished than any other minority, and all the claims of self determination are often undermined when economic exploitation comes into play. A reservation choosing to ban alcohol from its land (one of the biggest problems facing Native Americans) will often find its authority undermined by the resident liquor store which will find its power by going to a higher authority, namely the state.

Contrarily, a Native American Casino, often one of the few stable forms of income for a reservation, may find itself undercut by the conmen and frauds like Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed, who use the religious sensibilities of the surrounding state to similarly undermine a reservation's authority.

The reason I bring all this up is because politics often focuses on narrow issues like immigration, while forgetting the more primal roots of these issues.

7. What do you believe should be done about the ignorance of the American voting community?

This one is inspired by a combination of two sources. The first is my wife, a typically apolitical person who continually asks me "how could Americans vote for an idiot like Bush?" I try to explain the nuances of the American electoral system, the interplay of the media and propaganda, the role of religious conservatism and big business before my wife gives up in disgust.

The other was a piece on a recent Dan Carlin show where he looked at consumption of news information, which is apparently about the same as it ever was but now grossly imbalanced. There are massive news junkies like me who are listening or watching for hours each day, and the average person who gets nothing. Apparently people like me make up approximately 20% of the American population, while 80% tune in to American Idol.

And then, of course, there's the people I mentioned last week who tune into the news and get Lindsay Lohan.

So, what should America do about its uninformed populace who are willing to elect a George Bush, despite the fact he was grossly incompetent?

8. What can America learn from the rest of the world?

I am sick and tired of politicians getting away with the phrase "we have a [fill in the gap] which is the envy of the world". Mittens was the last one to use it, explaining why American didn't need to do anything about its healthcare system.

Oh, and America doesn't torture either. I'll wait a minute for you to stop laughing.

OK, so all this patriotic fooforah shows a level of arrogance that is destroying America. And I'm not talking Rick "the model" Martell arrogance here, I'm talking about Razor Ramon taking on the 123 Kid arrogance.

I want to know why America seems to think there's nothing they can learn from the rest of the world. Seems the only person listening to the rest of the world seem to be the CIA trying to track down Al Qaeda.

Hell, we were telling you not to elect Bush last election. While he has a 25% approval rating now, in 2004 he had a worldwide approval rating of around 10%. If you had only listened to us then…

So, what do you think you could learn from us?


OK, so if anyone would like to send these questions to their favourite nominee, here's the list in contracted form:

1. Do you believe the U.S has a duty towards the United Nations, and what do you believe that duty is?

2. Do you believe the US should be bound by International Laws?

3. Do you believe that America's interests are best served by maintaining U.S. hegemony?

4. Do you believe that U.S. Corporations should be protected by the 14th Amendment?

5. What duty, if any, do you feel that the US owes to the countries which have been affected by its foreign policy over the past 50 years?

6. What duty, if any, does the US have towards its indigenous (Native Americans, Native Hawaiians) population?

7. What do you believe should be done about the ignorance of the American voting community?

8. What can America learn from the rest of the world?

I look forward to hearing how people would respond to these questions.

Shut the Hell Up Award

I normally go for something under the radar, but I missed a golden opportunity last week when Michael Weiner made a run for an end-of-the-year Shut the Hell Up Award. Who's Michael Weiner? You might know him as Michael Savage, but he shares that name with a highly regarded former New Zealand Prime Minister, so I'll call him the name his parents named him… Michael Weiner.

Last week he decided reality was not his friend when he decided to go all conspiracy nut on us.

Am I to believe that there's no connection between Charles Schumer on Friday saying that he would never appoint, or never, excuse me, approve another Bush appointment to the court, to any court? And then the chief justice suffers a so-called seizure two days later? You're telling me there's no possibility of a conspiracy by the Democrats to have caused this seizure in some manner?

I've heard recordings of Savage tearing apart conspiracy theories about 9/11 and bohemian grove, but he then turns around and launches this specious bullshit?

You're telling me there's no possibility of a conspiracy by the Democrats to have caused this seizure in some manner? Tell me that it's not possible. Tell me that the stakes are not so high that the liberals -- who've finally lost the court after 50 years -- that they would stop short of anything like this. Tell me it's not possible, and I'll tell you you're a liar.

So let me have a shot at this one…

You're telling me that it's not possible for some nut suffering from delusions of grandeur to throw around wild conspiracy theories in an effort to boost the ratings of his insane right wing rantings? Tell me that's not possible. Tell me that the stakes are not so high that the insane pundits – who've finally lost their marbles after decades of teetering of the edge of the abyss – that they would stop short of something like this. Tell me it's not possible, and I'll tell you that you're a liar…

Put it that way, I suppose it's possible.

The Section formerly known as pimping

Brian McLain continues his excellent expose on fascism here.

Joe feels the need to defend his defence of Giuliani here and does a pretty good job. For the record, the reason I didn't give Giuliani a better grade was not because I don't think he's doing a good job getting the Republican nomination, but because I think that getting the Republican nomination is probably going to bite his ass in the long term. His patriotic war mongering may endear him to the right, but I would hope that they will turn off the average person.

Greg Allen looks at bridges and some other thing called schmidges… I got the bridges part, but I missed the rest. It must be a two part expose.

Brandon Crow, upset that Justin Baragona didn't name him his favourite writer last week, refused to ask me to play fact or fiction this week. It's okay. Justin still reads my columns.

And Dan Martin takes a close look at free trade right here

Well, that's all for this week. ‘Nuff said and, as always,

Kia Kaha