This Is MY Country . . .

The United States of America: one nation, under surveillance, with libertine injustice for all, especially women.

To be deemed a patriot, rather than a terrorist (there are no other designations) in this new United States, one must worship a Christian god and play by the rules of the old, male theocrats who interpret god's directives for the rest of us, and make them into the law of the land. No Buddhists, Muslims,atheists or Hottentots need apply.

Our wars are just wars; we must wage war unrelentingly because there is so much evil in the world, especially in places with lots of crude petroleum beneath the surface. Such places tend to teem with non-Christians who are worthy only of becoming collateral damage in our just wars.

The most important beings in our new United States are called corporations. They are people, like us, only richer and more powerful, with many more rights than we have.

Our masters, the theocrats and deeply religious corporations, have been forced to move heavy-handedly against a rampant new sin of the modern world: the enjoyment of sex by women. God invented sex for the making of babies and only for the making of babies. Doing it for fun is a crime against church and state -- and certain closely-held or faith-based corporations.

There are three branches of government in the new United States.  The legislative branch consists of two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Some members of both houses are called Republicans and some are called Democrats.  They are largely indistinguishable from one another. Each of them is owned by corporations and the only legislation that ever passes these houses is made of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.

The judicial branch of government consists of courts of various kinds.  Some make sure that our jails are kept full of people of color.  But the most important court of all is the U.S. Supreme Court, which is run by five, old Roman Catholic males. Their job is to make rulings that enable the people called corporations to become ever richer and more powerful. They also monitor the subservience of women and suppress seditious ideas like equal pay for equal work.

The third branch of government, the executive, embraces the president, his cabinet and an enormous bureaucracy. The president's main job is to decide who's a terrorist. Terrorists can be arrested for no reason at all, tortured, incarcerated forever without charges, and killed at the discretion of the president, who, in fact, is the sole custodian of the official kill list. The kill list is like an insurance policy on our fleet of drones, to make certain they're working properly. The cabinet advises the president on important matters like foreign policy. Iraq is their handiwork. The vast federal bureaucracy exists mainly to give the Tea Party something to wax wroth about. The Tea Party is a loose alliance of gun nuts, libertarian fruitcakes, religious kooks and anti-tax crazies who want to keep government's hands off "their" Medicare.

To one degree or another, each branch of government has a role in managing something called "the economy." The economy is about money. Government sees to it that the richest one per cent of us get more and more money.  That leaves less and less money for the rest of us. This is the way god wants it to be.  God, it seems, is just another oligarch.

Most of the richest among us, especially the people called corporations, pay no taxes, so it remains for the poorest among us to pay for our wars.  Our budget for military stuff is bigger than China's budget for rice plus Russia's budget for vodka plus the U.K.'s budget for kinky sex. You could probably even throw in France's budget for pâté de fois gras, and still have room for John Boehner's tanning salons. We can't afford to waste our tax money on food for poor kids or medical care for veterans of our wars or fixing our decrepit infrastructure or improving our public schools or reducing pollution or slowing the pace of the climate change that is destroying our planet.

The most important task of our government is called national security. Keeping us secure requires the government to listen to everything we say and watch everything we do -- even in our bedrooms ("Better not be having FUN in there!")

Our tax dollars maintain a very special government outfit called the CIA. Its job is top secret.  So is its budget. So are its agents, unless they've been outed by Dick Cheney.  The CIA sees to it that dictators we don't like get violently overthrown and replaced by dictators we do like.  Sometimes after liking a dictator for a decade or so, we decide not to like him. That's called Saddam Hussein. Except in Ukraine where it's called Svoboda.

Is this a great country or what?