Who's The Patriot?

The Blog | Jane Smiley: Whoops | The Huffington Post
"...When you and your relatives are fighting about who is a patriot and who isn't (you--yes, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Rice--not), you can ask them if the loyalties of our ruling class can be shown to be to us, regular US citizens, or to some other group, such as themselves--wealthy citizens and investors of all nations. After 9/11, our government gathered up the Bin Ladens and other Arab investors and sent them out of harm's way. Yesterday, Halliburton declared that it is moving its headquarters to Dubai. No prominent Republican that I know of has shipped his children off to the Iraq War. Jonah Goldberg didn't bother to sign up. Neither did Ann Coulter. Most importantly, Bush took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and he has subverted it at every turn. The Constitution represents the will of the people. It, in fact, represents the people and is their document. But this is nothing new for the corporate class. They are used to aggrandizing themselves at the expense of the nation. When Goldman Sachs demanded tax breaks from the City of New York as the price of keeping their offices there, and then turned around and handed out princely bonuses at the end of 2006, it was no surprise--corporations have no loyalties--not to their workers, not to their customers, not to their nations. And don't get me started on their perennial resistance to product safety. Every time a corporation witholds taxes owed or keeps them offshore, they are acting in an unpatriotic manner, and yet they are the first to scream when dissenters raise legitimate questions about, for example, using the American army as a band of mercenaries to conquer oil lands in the Middle East.."