How much do you trust The U.S. government?

[CC]

This poll is for anyone, not just citizens of the USA. Please choose one.

I'm attempting to sort out how much "faith" people have in US actions and at what point can we all agree about our government. (if any)..........:O)

[DOPPLER]

E. I cannot help but to be suspicious of everything when it comes to this administration, simply because it seems that no matter what they do, good or bad, there is some kind of twisted motive behind it all. Also, the Patriot act has left a very, very bad taste in my mouth. Nothing is sacred to this government anymore.

That's my beef in a VERY small nutshell, haha.

[Jamie]

I voted E. I don't trust anyone 100% and the government isn't exempt from that!

[Slipnish]

Can you use the terms "trust" and "government" in the same sentence without it being an oxymoron?

[Bf55]

none!!!!

[CliveStaples]

Odd that so many liberals purport to "distrust the government". You'd think they'd embrace privatization of SS, maybe back off of the whole "nanny government" thing, perhaps cut some programs that stifle entrepreneurship, maybe lower the minimum wage, and maybe--just maybe--lower taxes. But I guess we can only trust the government when a Democrat is in charge--then everything runs fine!

[KevinBrowning]

Poorly worded poll. I trust the current administration to a large extent in both foreign and domestic policy matters, so there is no option that represents my stance.

[Bf55]

never!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :no: !they scare me with their cover ups and retarted politicians

[FruitandNut]

Odd that so many liberals purport to "distrust the government". You'd think they'd embrace privatization of SS, maybe back off of the whole "nanny government" thing, perhaps cut some programs that stifle entrepreneurship, maybe lower the minimum wage, and maybe--just maybe--lower taxes. But I guess we can only trust the government when a Democrat is in charge--then everything runs fine!

A good electioneering rant, but it hardly answers the question. :bad:

All governments tell lies and do stupid things from time-to-time - some more so than others.

[CliveStaples]

It wasn't a matter of answering questions, but questioning others' answers.

That government governs best which governs least.

[FruitandNut]

CS - What is 'least'? Does that constitute looking after you and your's, and no further - ideally using someone else's money to achieve that aim? (That uses the dangerous classes' money to control the dangerous classes while encouraging and even funding corporate and entrepreneurial excesses and fraud - oops, I mean, enterprise.)

Or would you rather have a government that didn't really govern?

[Jamie]

Odd that so many liberals purport to "distrust the government". You'd think they'd embrace privatization of SS, maybe back off of the whole "nanny government" thing, perhaps cut some programs that stifle entrepreneurship, maybe lower the minimum wage, and maybe--just maybe--lower taxes. But I guess we can only trust the government when a Democrat is in charge--then everything runs fine!

Hmm the liberals on the board call me conservative, and the conservatives on this board call me liberal. Go figure. Clinton was a shady little man and so is Bush. Has nothing to do w/ what side of the coin they are on. All politicians lie, just like every other human on the planet lies about something.

[CC]

KB:
I trust the current administration to a large extent in both foreign and domestic policy matters,

Uhm....then that would be E. Hardly poorly worded, the choices are clear. I think you don't like where this is going.....*g*.........:O)

[CliveStaples]

CS - What is 'least'? Does that constitute looking after you and your's, and no further - ideally using someone else's money to achieve that aim? (That uses the dangerous classes' money to control the dangerous classes while encouraging and even funding corporate and entrepreneurial excesses and fraud - oops, I mean, enterprise.)

Private enterprise will always generate more wealth than government-directed enterprise. I prefer that people, in general, have more wealth.

Governments are not free from fraudulent exchanges; I wonder how many private charities could have pulled off a scam as large as Oil for Food?


Or would you rather have a government that didn't really govern?

I'll say it again: "That government governs best which governs least." That statement does not read: "That government governs best which governs not at all", nor does it read "That government governs worst which governs at all".

[KevinBrowning]

KB:

Uhm....then that would be E. Hardly poorly worded, the choices are clear. I think you don't like where this is going.....*g*.........:O)

Well yes, I mistrust the government to some extent in all it does, and I would hope everyone else does too. My point is that my trust for the American government is much larger than my mistrust for it. There is no option that captures the spirit of my view.

[CC]

There is no option that captures the spirit of my view.

agreed.....but the answer is still E. I wanted views, not so much the sprit of one's view.......:O)

[KevinBrowning]

agreed.....but the answer is still E. I wanted views, not so much the sprit of one's view.......:O)

Alright, I give up. I'll vote E, simply to see where you're taking this.

[ShadowKnight]

I voted E for obvious reasons. I think a lot of the politics in government are very corrupt and nothing is ever clean cut as it seems.

[Zenstone]

I prefer that people, in general, have more wealth.

Do you mean more people subject to the US government have more wealth, or more people subject to other governments have more wealth? Only the latter is consistent with your position:

The US has record trade and budget deficits, which means the US is, in the long run, supporting the later. For example, the US has reduced trade barriers at alarming rates, allowing offshoring of the manufacturing and technical workforces.

Obvisouly, the US does not govern the populations of other countries. Therefore,the US is "governing least" in cases where it best promotes the generation of wealth.

[CliveStaples]

Do you mean more people subject to the US government have more wealth, or more people subject to other governments have more wealth? Only the latter is consistent with your position:

The US has record trade and budget deficits, which means the US is, in the long run, supporting the later. For example, the US has reduced trade barriers at alarming rates, allowing offshoring of the manufacturing and technical workforces.

Obvisouly, the US does not govern the populations of other countries. Therefore,the US is "governing least" in cases where it best promotes the generation of wealth.


Wrong. They are accepting U.S. dollar bills, not goods or services. Therefore, they are subsidizing us--we come out with a net gain of goods and services, while the other countries come out with a net gain of dollars, which have no intrinsic value.

[FruitandNut]

Private enterprise will always generate more wealth than government-directed enterprise. I prefer that people, in general, have more wealth.

Governments are not free from fraudulent exchanges; I wonder how many private charities could have pulled off a scam as large as Oil for Food?

I'll say it again: "That government governs best which governs least." That statement does not read: "That government governs best which governs not at all", nor does it read "That government governs worst which governs at all".

Conservative governments are among those who govern least, but allow corporate business to use them as a surrogate facade of legitimacy through which to operate on the global and domestic stages.

Published on Friday, April 11, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
The Real War - On American Democracy
by Thom Hartmann

In the midst of news of foreign wars, Americans are beginning to wake up to the real war being waged here at home. It is, however, a confused awakening.
For example, Americans wonder why the Bush administration seems so intent on crippling local, state, and federal governments by starving them of funds and creating huge federal debt that our children will have to repay.
Many think it's just to fund tax cuts and subsidies for the rich, that the multimillionaire CEOs who've taken over virtually all senior posts in the Bush administration are just pigs at the trough, and this is a spectacular but ordinary form of self-serving corruption. It all seems so plausible, and there's even a grain of truth to it.

But juicy deals for Bush administration insiders are just a by-product of the real and deeper war against democracy. The neoconservatives are perfectly happy for us to think they're just opportunists skirting the edges of legality and morality, but this is far more dangerous than simple government corruption.
Indeed, the neo-conservatives claim to be anti-government. As a leading spokesman for the neo-con agenda, Grover Norquist, told National Public Radio's Mara Liasson in a May 25, 2001 Morning Edition interview, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Without a larger view, the issues of domestic spending, oil, neo-conservative power plays in both major parties, the loss of liberties, anti-government rhetoric, and war in the Middle East all seem like separate and unconnected events. They're not.

The "new conservatives" who've seized the Republican Party and, through the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) are nipping at the heels of the Democratic Party, are not our parents' conservatives. Historic conservatives like Barry Goldwater, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower would be appalled. Although their philosophical roots go back to Alexander Hamilton, who openly argued during the Constitutional Convention that royalty was the best form of government, the neo-cons have always been kept to the fringe, nipping at the heels of democracy.
In past times those promoting what is now called the neo-conservative agenda went by different names.
The Founders of America knew that for 6000 years "civilized" humans had always been ruled by one of three groups: kings, theocrats, or feudal lords. Kings held power by threat of violence and continual warfare; theocrats and popes held power by the people's fear of a god or gods; and feudal lords held power by wealth and the power that comes from throwing average people into poverty.
The "new" idea of our Founders in 1776 was to throw off all three of these historic tyrannies and replace them with a fourth way - people being ruled by themselves. A government that derived its legitimacy and continuing existence solely from the approval of its citizens. Government of, by, and for "We, The People." They called it a republican democracy.
What we are seeing now in the neoconservative agenda is nothing less than an attempt to overthrow republican democracy and replace it with a worldwide feudal state.

The last time this happened, the feudalists took over a monarchy and then North America. In December 1600, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the East India company, ultimately leading to a corporate takeover of the Americas that the colonists ended with the Boston Tea Party and, three years later, the American Revolution. This corporate-state partnership went on to conquer India, but eventually faded out as the British Empire faded, and the British government, along with most of Western Europe, embraced Jeffersonian forms of democracy.
But it raised its head again in the 20th Century, revived by Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini. The Italian dictator even used the word "corporatism" to describe it, and then later renamed it as "fascism" - a word that was defined in American dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company) in 1983 as "fas-cism (fash'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Since the "Reagan Revolution," two centuries after we rose up and rebelled against King George III's support of corporate feudalism in Boston Harbor, this ancient enemy of democracy is again trying to seize America. Reagan ignored the Sherman Act and other restraints on corporations, and sold at fire-sale prices the airwaves once held in common by We, The People. The result was predictable: a merger and acquisitions frenzy, and the takeover of American media by a handful of mega-corporations. Bill Clinton then helped export corporatism to the industrialized world when he pushed GATT/WTO through Congress.

Thus, the war on Iraq was just one front in the larger feudal war against democracy itself. (And a particularly useful one - it gave the corporate feudal lords access to oil wealth, and was so effective at distracting the populace from Bush's outrageous domestic agenda that we can expect to see another war, somewhere, in November of 2004.)
In 1936 - years before America turned its attention to fighting fascism in Germany - Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about the rise of a corporate feudalism here in the United States. In a speech in Philadelphia on June 27th, he said: "Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service."
Roosevelt suggested that human nature may play a part in it all, but that didn't make it tolerable. "It was natural and perhaps human," he said, "that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself."
It was a control the Democratic Party of 1936 found intolerable. "As a result," Roosevelt said, "the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man."
Republicans of the day lashed out in the press and on radio, charging that Roosevelt was anti-American, even communist. Without a moment's hesitation, he threw it back in their faces.
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America," Roosevelt thundered in that 1936 speech. "What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

Those of us who still believe in republican democracy would have "We, The People" make the decisions through representatives we've elected without the feudal influence of corporate money. We realize that "big government" is, indeed, a menace when it's no longer responsive to its own people, as happened in Germany and Russia in the last century - and is happening today in America under the neoconservatives.
But we also remember the vision of a free and democratic America - a sacred archetype so powerful that protestors in Tiananmen Square marched to their deaths carrying a 36-foot-tall paper mache replica of the Statue Of Liberty while quoting the words of Thomas Jefferson.
Facing the power of The East India Company's corporate feudalism in 1773, the Founders of our nation, unable to get their voices heard in the halls of the British government or even in many of the newspapers of the day, turned to two non-violent and very effective methods to spread the new meme of democracy.
The first was pamphleteering - and the internet is today's pamphlet. Millions are using email and pointing to websites to awaken people and promote democratic change.
The second was creating "committees of correspondence," also used extensively by the Women's Suffrage movement. These were groups organized to write letters to the editors of newspapers.
People across America have already begun letter writing, faxing, and email campaigns, and you can see the results on the editorial pages of our newspapers and in the reactions of some of our politicians. Other correspondents are blogging or calling in to talk shows, modern variations on this theme.
A correspondent in York, New York, who is pamphleteering in email and encouraging committees of correspondence to write letters to newspaper editors against the new feudalism's wars on America and overseas, shared the following quote from Emerson: "One of the illusions [of life] is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour."
Yet this is the critical and decisive hour, and we are not without voices or tools.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is an author and talk show host. To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 3 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for republication in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.

[Zenstone]

Wrong. They are accepting U.S. dollar bills, not goods or services. Therefore, they are subsidizing us--we come out with a net gain of goods and services, while the other countries come out with a net gain of dollars, which have no intrinsic value.

You are mistaken. "Dollar bills," is the vehicle by which wealth is quantified. The receipt of services does not compound wealth. Consumer goods to not retain value, and therefore do not compound wealth. Industry and trade promote wealth, power and influence, not the articles of trade themselves.

[Apokalupsis]

And just to be a smart ass...

Hellz ya! Teh USA will pwn j00!

Why was there no option for: "Other" or " I mis-trust the US gov to some extent in some areas."

Also, with such vague terminology or context of "trust" and "government", why isn't this addressing government in general or every government?

I mean is it the case that you all believe that there are other governments out there that you can trust absolutely and completely?

IMO, the op and thread title are just too vague to yield any value of truth here.

[CC]

Yeah, I could have put an "other"......However, the poll was meant to be in general. Had I qualified that though then we would still be at about the same point. Which is that none of us completely tryst our gov.

I was leading to if you think our gov has indeed then done some shady things over the war in Iraq.....Once we could agre that some things were probably shady I would then submit for other members to examine in what areas over our involvement in Iraq we could all agree (most anyway) on that were slight of hands that our gov did to us and the world when we invaded Iraq. With two people saying it is a worthless poll it appears that no lines of thought (that of our gov playing a nutshell game on us and the world) that would warrant further discussion.................:O)

[Spartacus]

This poll is for anyone, not just citizens of the USA. Please choose one.

I'm attempting to sort out how much "faith" people have in US actions and at what point can we all agree about our government. (if any)..........:O)

True Democracy is mob rule.

Thankfully the US is not a true democracy but rather a representative democracy -- a republic if you will. It is I think rather naiive to regard the US government as merely a series of "administrations". The US government is a lving breathing beast all its own. Administrations come and go but government institutions like Congress, the Supreme Court, Depratment of Defense, etc. etc. remain the same. Oh sure some of the key players might come and go -- but at theirs core these institutions remain the same decade after decade.

These institutions, their strengths and weaknesss are indicative of the American people as a whole. They strive to do good, are protective of their turf, perhaps a little too prideful and obnoxious at times, frequently make mistakes, have short memories and attentions spans -- but there is no one ese you want on your side in a fight. When you are in trouble and need help no one will do more faster than an American. You wll not find greater generosity, warmer hospitality or better-intended peole anywhere in the world.

Although there are some aspects to the Ameica psyche reflected in our governemnt that warrant some mistrust on occassion, by and large the US government, like the Pople of the US can be trusted wen you need help the most -- most of the time. :tup:

[Apokalupsis]

With two people saying it is a worthless poll it appears that no lines of thought (that of our gov playing a nutshell game on us and the world) that would warrant further discussion.................:O)
Well, I don't mean to say that it has NO value...just not the value that I think you had intended to place upon it that would have led you to the next step of your argument or observation, that's all.