U.S. no role model for democracy in Egypt

Letter to Egypt: The United States has spent trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan and may now be setting its sights on your country.

Much of the United States' vast budget surplus left to the Bush/Cheney administration was frittered away not only through tax cuts and banking de-regulations but on these oily military safaris as well. To this, our country is not only bankrupt financially but morally when, in the face of the widening gap between its rich and poor, and the evaporating working and middle classes, it cuts taxes for the very rich, and subsequently cuts programs in education, food programs, environmental protection, transportation and Social Security, sending its jobs overseas while denying health care to its citizens.

Egypt, do not invite the United States into your affairs. What moral compass and model of democracy can the United States offer when its highest court gives its stamp of approval for unlimited corporate spending in its elections? What could you want from a country whose top 20 percent, the upper class, own 85 percent of the total wealth? The United States is the most uneven and subsequently least democratic of any developed nation in the world. Its mega-rich help manufacture crooked elections, at home and abroad, and create mandates for invasions in countries just like your own.

Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt - as they turn in their graves over their own government's dismantling - would encourage you, Egyptian protesters, to endure in the fight against tyranny.

Brandon Ross

Iowa City