"US worse than the USSR"? American Amnesia of the worst sort

[JDPriestly]

126. But no link to the post that set this OP off.

I haven't seen any such post.

I traveled in Eastern Europe and in the more liberal parts at that.

Our surveillance is, thanks to the technology, far more advanced than theirs was.

Our prison system is horrible

And we have more prisoners per 100 in prison than any other nation -- the highest percentage of the population of any country on earth. Higher than Russia or China.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate

KPFK in Los Angeles is now sponsoring a series of programs about the use of solitary confinement in California prisons. Of course, the SHU (solitary confinement) is a response to gangs in our society and in particular in the prisons. So the problem is complex and the government and private prisons are not entirely to blame for it. Economic inequality is so severe that we have ghettos in which gangs survive and are for some the keys to survival. But we can't say that we are best society. We are not nearly, nearly, nearly as bad as the Soviet Union or NAZI Germany were.

But we are definitely not facing or solving our problems effectively. The surveillance is just one symptom of that. No one wants a collective society. I don't think very many people want to change from capitalism. But we need better checks on the corporatism that has taken over. And we do not need to spend so much money on surveillance when we have so many homeless people among us, schools that are in terrible repair and such terrible disparity in income between the poor and the very rich and a dwindling middle class.

Our problems are very different from those of the Soviet Union, but ours are very serious.

I posted about my life in German-speaking countries and in Eastern Europe. We are headed in that direction. There is talk of placing manned drones at our borders -- like the towers in Eastern Europe, the primitive form of drones. Yes those in Eastern Europe, in our view, were intended to keep people in, but the heads of governments put them up at least in part because they feared armed aggression from the West. Seems incredible to us, but that was the argument. Our surveillance is far worse than anything they could do in the USSR or Eastern Europe. And that is why they don't need us to tell on our neighbors.

Also, we have been placed into perpetual war. I have no idea whether some of it is warranted because it goes on and on. It's very odd. The thirty years war in Europe was considered a horrible thing. How long are we going to fight over oil? Why don't we invest more in alternative energy and energy saving measures and less on the military.

The Middle East would be almost irrelevant to us if we and the rest of the world did not need so much oil.

But the perpetual war is the excuse for government repression of the citizens. We did not experience that too much in WWI because the war that involved American citizens lasted only about five years although the recovery of Europe and other countries hard hit by that war took much longer.

So, although the situation in the Soviet Union was not equivalent to our own, there are some frightening trends here.

For example, our media is increasingly owned and dominated by corporate interests that have no patience with opinions, facts or history that puts them in a bad light or does not serve their interests. In the USSR, the government controlled the media. Here, for much of the nation, corporations with a rather unified view on most things (within rather narrow parameters permitting some differences of opinion and focus) is the media. In many parts of our country there is no alternative media that is not dependent on the wealthy few to place ads or sponsor shows. Almost none of our TV is financially independent enough to feature unusual views much less dissent.

So, no we are not the USSR, not near it yet. But we are definitely headed in that direction.

And if you think you can go to court and sue a company and get a fair trial when you have been cheated, watch out. You may have signed an arbitration agreement that pretty much eliminates your opportunity to be heard in court and limits drastically what kind of settlement or damages you might get. Also, if you want to file a lawsuit, court costs have increase in recent years. Even if you just get a parking ticket in a city like Los Angeles, the cost is painfully high for a low-wage earner or a retired person on Social Security but a joke to wealthy people.

Our country has a lot of injustice and a lot of unfairness and the idea that so much tax money is spent on a boondoggle surveillance program while elderly people sleep under bridges in our big cities is just abhorrent to me.

Now about that link, I would like to see it. The accusation has been made that someone said we were worse than the USSR. I would like to know where that idea came from. We are not worse than the USSR. But we are headed in that direction.