The New Aristocrats of Finance Pose a Serious Threat to Our Democratic Way of Life

By Joe Costello, Archein
Posted on August 8, 2010, Printed on August 9, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147775/

Let's face it, what a America needs is good clean fight. A fight that brings in everyone, redefines categories and alliances, cleanses our putrid politics, and establishes a healthy politics for the 21st century. At this point, there's just no way around it. Our politics is so defiled, our economy so completely in the clutches of a rabidly greedy few, and our government wallows in incompetence to the point of criminality, that the only cure is for the American people in unison to stand up, take responsibility, and claim what is rightfully ours. History shows this is never done without a fight.

I've always hated the term "American exceptionalism", more for how it was defined, than the concept itself. In the last decades, American exceptionalism has too often been defined as industrial capitalism, ribald consumerism, and militarism. But if we've learned anything in the last decades, these traits were easily transferred across the globe. However, what was not so easily transferred, and what historically is truly exceptional is this republic. In recorded history, the existence of republics, of self-government, has been the exception, and this republic with all its faults has indeed been exceptional. Here the masses of Europe, who for millenia tore each other apart, united under the banner of universal equality, intermixed, intermarried, and thrived. Over the centuries, fitfully and in small steps, and with still a ways to go, people from every other part of the world have slowly in some cases, and more rapidly in other, been brought into the mix.