profits, we moved into conquest by genocide.
Because labor is short in small and even growing colonies, we turned to slavery, and built a whole economy on its back.
We fought a great civil war to destroy slavery, but then turned around and in the name of manifest destiny finished the coast to coast conquest, genocide and actively worked to destroy indigenous cultures.
We annexed the Philippines, carried a big stick in Central and South America and overturned many governments there in favor of our 'business interests.'
We, particularly the Bush family, were instrumental in creating the military industrial complex, always hungry for war and killing so shareholders may profit.
We elevated shareholder profits above human life itself by legal doctrine (Dodge Brothers v Henry Ford, MI Supreme Court, 1919).
FDR created the New Deal because this country almost went 'red' (Communist) during the depression because there were no safety nets. Unemployment, welfare, food assistance and old age pensions did not exist. They were created and those in the country who were white Protestants prospered. We had a middle class that became the envy of the world, and after the Second World War, were the so-called 'arsenal of democracy.'
In the South, slavery was resurrected through Jim Crow laws, and we literally had an apartheid system for decades.
Then, when Eisenhower's plan to take Cuba (Bay of Pigs) failed on Kennedy's watch, and then Kennedy faced down Kruschev in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the military industrial complex was disappointed, and when he refused to send thousands of troops over to Vietnam so shareholders of companies like General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrup Grumman, Dow Chemical and Colt could rake in profits, JFK was mysteriously assassinated.
LBJ sent 500K people over to Nam and tore this country apart. Civil rights, consumer rights, women's rights and anti-war movements burgeoned and it alarmed the greed-lizards on Wall Street.
The US Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court, to create a blueprint for a corporate takeover of the US government at local, state and national levels. The Powell Memorandum, also known as the Powell Manifesto, laid out the plan for a corporate propaganda network, attacks on academic freedom, the plan to take over the Republican primary process, bust unions, take away worker pensions, destroy the New Deal programs, and dilute consumer concerns with pseudo science.
In 1981, Reagan slithered into the White House saying government is the problem, not the solution, and began the systematic erosion of our faith in government that had already taken such a hit during the Vietnam War.
Then, in 1987, Ronald Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine, which required truthful reporting of news at all local levels. This pulled the stops out of the Powell plan and accelerated it.
Powell and his allies on the Supreme Court legislated from the bench, and made rulings whenever they could that allowed corporate money to wield increasing influence on Congress. The Chicago School (von Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman) proposed the laughable theory that cutting taxes for corporations would create so many new jobs that the new payroll taxes would more than make up for the revenue shortfall. An economist named Buchanan, who was a favorite of billionaire parasites like the Koch brothers ended up promoting this through right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and ALEC.
Enough...you get the idea. Look at it through this lens and the ONLY thing we have ever been exceptional at is our potential to be the light on the hill. Too bad that has been destroyed by pride (false patriotism leading to war), wrath (unilateral invasion of Iraq based on lies to gin up the anger of Americans), envy (our consumer culture is based on keeping up with the Joneses), gluttony (big ag and the food industry pack our foods with growth hormones, trans fats and other things that are bad for us but more profitable, so we get fat - then a multi-billion dollar industry grows up around weight loss), lust (pornography, and even mundane commercials - sex sells!), and sloth (gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, gaming, extreme sports) that offers a false escape from the grinding realities of getting squeezed ever tighter to produce greater profits for Wall Street.
This is what we have. We ARE exceptional at a couple things, though. Denial, conspiracy theories, corruption, lies, and killing lots of people really fast.
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