What exactly are “American values?” What happened to “principles?”
The insidious, inexorable, and maybe psychotic morphing of American “values” is a process in motion.
When I hear people talk about our “values” I always think $1.99 a pound designer coffee---now that’s a value!
Are American “values” the developing of a more sophisticated, unseen and remote form of death by stealth UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) guided by young hands in Nevada? Certainly it is life imitating art if a surreal glide toward a “Terminator” world. There are bootlickers of the oligarchs in congress who wish drones patrolling our domestic air space even now. Call that the camel’s nose under the tent.
Every day around the globe there are at least 7,000 drones, UAVs, in the sky. Today there are more Americans being trained to fly them than to fly conventional airframes. Put another way, there are more predator drones flying and killing in the Obama administration than in the warmongering “w” administration. Change!
When we grow up having the majority’s “values” foisted on us many accept those “values” as “truth” ideas that may not represent a universal sense of reality. These “truths” are simply what the majority forces on the defenseless minority or minorities. Think of it as what Jefferson and the other founders referred to as tyranny by majority.
Growing up in Anglo-Saxon dominated America fifty years ago meant having Christmas and Easter foisted on us; today maybe a little less so.
Do our values finally say that a plant long used by humans, made criminal by tobacco-industry lobbyists and the majority’s scare-mongering may find its way into the mainstream?
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia already approve of the use of marijuana---it kills no one.
All fifty states approve of tobacco use. Tobacco kills 500,000 Americans every year. Around the world 5 million people annually die from using it. It costs us $100’s of millions of dollars in Medicare/Medicaid benefits annually for us to essentially underwrite, i.e. insure the product liability risk for big tobacco. Yet, until last year there was not even a minimal effort to “regulate” tobacco. This speaks to big tobacco’s control over the lapdogs in congress.
Tobacco companies paid little of the verdicts levied against them in the 1990’s. In the decade following those decisions the tobacco industry increased nicotine in cigarettes another 11% as if to say, “so there!”
Our lapdog congress had to agree to a $50B dollar tax credit to the tobacco industry in order to leverage the last minimum wage increase. Are those American “values?”
More:
Public Policy and American “values”
CIA, Military Rely Heavily On Predator Drones
AMOS: It has been reported that there are now more service members training to become a drone pilot - which essentially means you're watching a computer and flying by joystick - than those training to fly traditional warplanes. What does that say about the U.S. reliance on drones?
Mr. SINGER: We're experiencing a revolution in technology right now. We've gone from using a handful of these systems when our forces invaded Iraq, to now we have over 7,000 in the air. Who should be able to use it? Which is really what this debate is about. Should the Predator be a military technology, or is it something that you want, you know, intelligence agencies using? Or Department of Homeland Security also has its own systems like this. We're going through a massive change right now that raises a lot of questions we need to figure out.
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