Yes, I know the two parties are Tweedledee and Tweedledum as the loathsome George the Segregationist Wallace once said. He had a point ONLY on that though. BUT it is what we have. Use your vote as your ONLY source of power and forget ever on planet earth voting Republican. No one lives forever. Overturn Citizen's United by changing the Court when we can IF Democrats keep the presidency, keep the Senate, take back the House and make damn well sure the Democrats whom you elect do YOUR bidding and NOT the bidding of the corporate state. It is really that simple but remains seemingly an Everest mountaintop to climb!
An Exceptional Decline for the Exceptional Country?
The Empire as Basket Case
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does
-- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name
it -- will ever be brought to court. For none of its
beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable.
The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are
by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by
the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. I’m
speaking of the various whistleblowers and leakers who have had an urge
to let Americans know what deeds and misdeeds their government is
committing in their name but without their knowledge. They continue to pay a price in accountability for their acts that should, by comparison, stun us all.
As June ended, the New York Times front-paged an account
of an act of corporate impunity that may, however, be unique in the
post-9/11 era (though potentially a harbinger of things to come). In
2007, as journalist James Risen tells it, Daniel Carroll, the top
manager in Iraq for the rent-a-gun company Blackwater, one of the warrior corporations that accompanied
the U.S. military to war in the twenty-first century, threatened Jean
Richter, a government investigator sent to Baghdad to look into
accounts of corporate wrongdoing.
Here, according to Risen, is
Richter’s version of what happened when he, another government
investigator, and Carroll met to discuss Blackwater’s potential
misdeeds in that war zone:
“Mr. Carroll said ‘that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit. ‘Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone of voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on mine,’ Mr. Richter stated in his memo. ‘I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.’”
When officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest
in the world, heard what had happened, they acted promptly. They sided
with the Blackwater manager, ordering Richter and the investigator who
witnessed the scene out of the country (with their inquiry
incomplete). And though a death threat against an American official
might, under other circumstances, have led a CIA team or a set of
special ops guys to snatch the culprit off the streets of Baghdad, deposit him on a Navy ship for interrogation,
and then leave him idling in Guantanamo or in jail in the United
States awaiting trial, in this case no further action was taken.
Power Centers But No Power to Act
Think
of the response of those embassy officials as a get-out-of-jail-free
pass in honor of a new age. For the various rent-a-gun companies,
construction and supply outfits,
and weapons makers that have been the beneficiaries of the wholesale
privatization of American war since 9/11, impunity has become the new
reality. Pull back the lens further and the same might be said more
generally about America’s corporate sector and its financial outfits.
There was, after all, no accountability for the economic meltdown of
2007-2008. Not a single significant figure went to jail for bringing the American economy to its knees. (And many such figures made out like proverbial bandits in the government bailout and revival of their businesses that followed.)
Meanwhile,
in these years, the corporation itself was let loose to run riot. Long
a “person” in the legal world, it became ever more person-like,
benefitting from a series of Supreme Court decisions that hobbled unions
and ordinary Americans even as it gave the corporation ever more of the
rights and attributes of a citizen on the loose. Post-9/11, the
corporate world gained freedom of expression, the freedom of the purse,
as well as the various freedoms that staggering inequality and hoards
of money offer. Corporate entities gained, among other things, the
right to flood the political system with money, and most recently, at
least in a modest way, freedom of religion.
In
other words, two great power centers have been engorging themselves in
twenty-first-century America: there was an ever-expanding national
security state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by anyone, ever more deeply enveloped in secrecy, ever more able to see others and less transparent itself, ever more empowered by a secret court system and a body of secret law whose judgments
no one else could be privy to; and there was an increasingly
militarized corporate state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less
overseen by outside forces, ever more sure that the law was its
possession. These two power centers are now triumphant in our world.
They command the landscape against what may be less effective opposition
than at any moment in our history.
In both cases, no matter how you tote it up, it’s been an era of triumphalism. Measure it any way you want: by the rising Dow Jones Industrial Average or the expanding low-wage economy, by the power of “dark money” to determine American politics in 1% elections or the rising wages of CEOs and the stagnating wages of their workers, by the power of billionaires and the growth of poverty,
by the penumbra of secrecy and classification spreading across
government operations and the lessening ability of the citizen to know
what’s going on, or by the growing power of both the national security
state and the corporation to turn your life into an open book.
Look anywhere and some version of the same story presents itself -- of
ascendant power in the boardrooms and the backrooms, and of a sense of
impunity that accompanies it.
Whether you’re considering the power
of the national security state or the corporate sector, their moment is
now. And what a moment it is -- for them. Their success seems almost
complete. And yet that only begins to tell the strange tale of our
American times, because if that power is ascendant, it seems incapable
of being translated into classic American power. The more successful
those two sectors become, the less the U.S. seems capable of wielding
its power effectively in any traditional sense, domestically or abroad.
Anyone can feel it, hence the recent Pew Research Center poll
indicating a striking diminution in recent years of Americans who think
the U.S. is exceptional, the greatest of all nations. By 2011, only
38% of Americans thought that; today, the figure has dropped to 28%, and
-- a harbinger of future American attitudes -- just 15% among
18-to-29-year-olds. And no wonder. By many measures the U.S. may
remain the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet, but in recent
years its ability to accomplish anything, no less achieve national or
imperial success, has shrunk drastically.
The power centers
remain, but in some still-hard-to-grasp way, the power to accomplish
anything seems to be draining from a country that was once the great
can-do nation on the planet. On this, the record is both dismal and
clear. To say that the American political system is in a kind of
gridlock or paralysis from which -- given electoral prospects in 2014 and 2016 -- there can be no escape is to say the obvious. It’s a commonplace
of news reports to suggest, for example, that in this midterm election
year Congress and the president will be capable of accomplishing nothing
together (except perhaps avoiding another actual government shutdown).
Nada, zip, zero.
The president acts in relatively minimalist ways by executive order, Congress threatens to sue
over his use of those orders, and (as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would once
have said) so it goes. In the meantime, Congress has proven itself
unable to act even when it comes to what once would have been the
no-brainers of American life. It has, for instance, been struggling simply to fund
a highway bill that would allow for ordinary repair work on the
nation's system of roads, even though the fund for such work is running dry and jobs will be lost.
This sort of thing is but a symptom in a country of immense wealth whose infrastructure is crumbling
and which lacks a single mile of high-speed rail. In all of this, in
the rise of poverty and a minimum-wage economy, in a loss --
particularly for minorities
-- of the wealth that went with home ownership, what can be seen is the
untracked rise of a Third World country inside a First World one, a
powerless America inside the putative global superpower.
An Exceptional Kind of Decline
And speaking of the “sole superpower,” it remains true that no combination
of other militaries can compare with the U.S. military or the moneys
the country continues to put into it and into the research and
development of weaponry of the most futuristic sort. The U.S. national
security budget remains a Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not-style infusion of
tax dollars into the national security state, something no other
combination of major countries comes close to matching.
In addition, the U.S. still maintains hundreds of military bases and outposts across the planet (including, in recent years, ever more bases
for our latest techno-wonder weapon, the drone). In 2014, it still
garrisons the planet in a way that no other imperial power has ever
done. In fact, it continues to sport all the trappings of a great
empire, with an army impressive enough that our last two presidents have
regularly resorted to one unembarrassed image to describe it: “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”
And yet, recent history is clear: that military has proven incapable
of winning its wars against minor (and minority) insurgencies globally,
just as Washington, for all its firepower, military and economic, has
had a remarkably difficult time imposing its desires just about anywhere
on the planet. Though it may still look like a superpower and though
the power of its national security state may still be growing,
Washington seems to have lost the ability to translate that power into
anything resembling success.
Today, the U.S. looks less like a
functioning and effective empire than an imperial basket case, unable to
bring its massive power to bear effectively from Germany to Syria, Iraq
to Afghanistan, Libya to the South China Sea, the Crimea to Africa.
And stranger yet, this remains true even though it has no imperial
competitors to challenge it. Russia is a rickety energy state, capable
of achieving its version of imperial success only along its own borders,
and China, clearly the rising economic power on the planet, though flexing
its military muscles locally in disputed oil-rich waters, visibly has
no wish to challenge the U.S. military anywhere far from home.
All
in all, the situation is puzzling indeed. Despite much talk about the
rise of a multi-polar world, this still remains in many ways a unipolar
one, which perhaps means that the wounds Washington has suffered on
numerous fronts in these last years are self-inflicted.
Just what
kind of decline this represents remains to be seen. What does seem
clearer today is that the rise of the national security state and the
triumphalism of the corporate sector (along with the much publicized
growth of great wealth and striking inequality in the country) has been
accompanied by a decided diminution in the power of the government to
function domestically and of the imperial state to impose its will
anywhere on Earth.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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