The normally very calm and reasonable John W. Loftus has a post today that got him as upset as I’ve been known to be here on my blog, discussing religious issues:
In brief, a newly married young woman was gang-raped. The Saudi Arabian courts, in accord with their extreme Islamic tradition, found her at fault. But, due to relations with the West, instead of killing her like they usually do, they’re just going to have her brutally flogged.
John does a good, brief job pointing out the Judeo-Christian connections in this story, so I’ll leave it at that. What I want to point out is the political issues at hand. Saudi Arabia is the U.S.’s primary “friend” in the Middle East…well, aside from Israel. And why is this? The uber-rich oil families that the Bush family is very cozy with. Yet, Saudi Arabia is one of the most extremely fundamentalist Islam nations. Not only that, but the majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from there, as are the majority of the non-Iraqi insurgents within Iraq! More than 60%! (Iran, by the way, accounts for less than 5% of the Iraqi insurgents.)
Meanwhile, there was Iraq 8 years ago. One of the few secular nations in the Middle East (maybe only). Iraq had a strong Middle Class, a strong economic base, pretty decent social health care, a well educated populace, and good social services.
OK, obviously it must be said, Hussein was a brutal dictator, and his sons were psychopaths. The world’s better off without them, no question. But in the Bush Crime Family’s obsessive desire to control the oil interests in Iraq, instead of just putting down a dictator, he’s brought a formerly modern, progressive society back into a dark ages, to match Saudi Arabia. Millions of people have left Iraq, leaving mostly the poor and super wealthy. The schools and universities have a fraction of their former students. Places still don’t have working water and electricity. And worst yet, religious fundamentalism is rushing in to fill the social gap.
Let’s look at something here: Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, between 1940 and 1980, this country’s middle class was soaring. Strong and powerful. The U.S. middle class had economic power and political power. Since Reagan and his Milton Friedman economic policies which called for the increased power of the corporations, the removal of Unions, civil services, and privatizing of The Commons, equating social progressivism as “evil empire red Communism,” and funneling the wealth toward the top in order for it to “trickle down,” and removing the borders on production and distribution, the middle class has become weaker and weaker. Since 1980, the middle class has been having to work harder and harder to barely get what the previous generation had. We have very little say in politics, as the government has become the tool of the corporations and the wealthy elite. The middle class is becoming the working poor and our nation is heading back into a new Gilded Age of pre-Depression era economics–except with HDTV’s and XBox’s. And most American families in many times more debt than the average family 90 years ago.
The government likes a weak middle class, because it allows them (them being those who control the government–and take a look at who that is, Republican AND Democrat. Elite, wealthy corporatists), to consolidate power and arrange things to continue to funnel wealth to the top 5%. They don’t like having the majority of the country mucking things up with demands for social institutions, social programs, quality education, the means to be able to do something other than work two jobs to barely make ends meet, making more money for the CEO’s and more debt for the worker, who won’t have time and energy and resources and ability to demand change.
So the U.S. government likes the way counties like Saudi Arabia runs things–massively rich oil families at the top, crushed populace at the bottom, the tool of religion controlling the hearts and minds of the masses, keeping them in line. (Karl Rove’s expressed opinion to insiders, that religion component. He’s not been secret about his desire to use the Religious Right as a tool to foster unquestioned allegiance and submission to the President and the administration).
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