To the Journal editor:

U.S. foreign policy, be it just about any administration, is full of hypocrisy, bad policies, has ruined and is ruining our culture and the infrastructure is deteriorating, with roads, bridges, the school system and global warming in chaos if not spiraling downward, not to a better world.

Much a part of this bad situation is the military-industrial-congressional complex. President Eisenhower warned us against this in his farewell address. “… he warned the American people to guard against the growing and excessive militarization of society … through such indicators as the growth of the national defense budget, the increasingly militaristic posture of the nation in foreign policy, the magnitude of profits for the corporations engaged extensively in defense businesses, and the size of subsidies paid by the Pentagon to defense contractors.”

On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his “Four Freedoms” speech before Congress which are in order “freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world … freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world … freedom from want – everywhere in the world, and freedom from fear – which means a world-wide reduction in armaments … in such a fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in world.”

The United States is fast becoming, if not is, a very undemocratic nation. Its leaders, be them in Congress or the two major political parties, or others working to forward neo-con policies, so destructive for the world, are cowards, afraid of dissent and criticism of policies, intent on upholding the powers of the few and money.

The U.S. has a long history of destabilizing governments, covertly and overtly such as Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran and Iraq and others. It is addicted to war, it perpetuates wars, keeping the profits coming into the arms industry and other aided by the National Surveillance and National Security and Police State we now find ourselves living in.

The facade is democracy, but the reality is money buying influence and power to enact legislation favoring corporations, the banking industry and the wealthy tax breaks for them.

There are too many working poor, too much poverty. It is a failure of representative democracy which is not really representative of and for most of its people.

ISIS is a blowback of U.S. policy.

Fred Jakobcic

Marquette