What Does America Stand For?

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Some Schmo
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Re: What Does America Stand For?

Post by Some Schmo »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:12 pm
So, the real question, and thus the real subject of this thread is why did you start this thread? What was the impetus?
There were a couple reasons:

1) I was genuinely curious how people would answer that question for themselves. As the OP indicated, I was expecting a range of answers.

2) When I heard the (para)phrase "Everything America stands for" I thought of "stands for" in the sense, "Stop that. I won't stand for it." It occurred to me that what you stand for could be both positive and negative. When it's positive, it's an ideal. When it's negative, it's something you tolerate.
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Moksha
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Re: What Does America Stand For?

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Does anyone know if former Attorneys General Barr and Sessions have been in the news?
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Gunnar
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Re: What Does America Stand For?

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According to Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address (one of the greatest, most inspiring speeches of all time) one of the things America stands for (or at least gives a great deal of lip service to) is the ideal of a "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Unfortunately our government seems to be devolving into a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. We like to see ourselves as a standard bearer of democracy and an inspiration to aspiring democracy movements around the world, but too often, American corporate greed has actually worked against democratic movements in order to unfairly exploit the poorest of the poor in developing countries. The most famous examples of this are how the United Fruit Company shamelessly undermined legitimate democratic movements in Central American Countries to insure a cheap and impoverished labor force, in order to establish a monopoly, enhance their profit margin, and establish cruel oligarchies eager to keep their suffering people in line. Examples:

Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Revised and Expanded (Series on Latin American Studies) 2nd Edition
Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.
The above linked examples only a small part of the widely available documentation of our government's intrusions into these countries for our own selfish benefit and to the great detriment of their people and their economies. The horrible conditions in these countries responsible for the desperation of so many of their people to escape and seek asylum and better opportunities for themselves, and especially for their children, are largely due to what American corporate greed with the complicity of our government officials (both Republican and Democrat) has done to them.

See also: United Fruit Company

SS, I'm sure you are more familiar than most with the havoc done to Honduras, in particular, by these machinations of past U.S. policies.
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