George Monbiot takes up a theme we dealt with here the other day: the centrality of the Pentagon war machine -- and its attendant corporate war profiteers -- in American policy and politics today.
Monbiot's specific subject is the U.S. "missile defense system" -- the greatest boondoggle in human history, and an endless fount of corruption for decades. But he also provides an excellent general description of America's degraded, dysfunctional state, which is never on more naked display than during the quadrennial freak show of a presidential campaign:
If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government's interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.
I'm afraid this will be the chief question of interest to the next administration as well. As for "missile defense" -- which is now playing a starring role in the new Cold War being avidly fomented by America's bipartisan political elite - Monbiot is worth quoting at length:
The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing....All the trials run so far - successful or otherwise - have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn't have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.
This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle - formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence - points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile's susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.
Monbiot then gets to the corroded heart of the matter: scratch, geetus, moolah, long green. As he notes, the Pentagon and its willing enablers on both sides of the political aisle have come up with a truly artistic budgetary innovation to keep golden goose a-laying: "spiral development." From Monbiot:
The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government's usual accounting standards. It's called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.
Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that "the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation". Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars' worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.
So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I'll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn't work.
US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.
Monbiot also points out the obvious: the nation must be kept in a constant welter of fear and indignation in order to keep the pork flowing:
To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets.
Yes, there's nothing inherently American about fearmongering and corruption. The Kremlin knows full well that the missile defense system which Bush is installing in Poland doesn't work. But it looks threatening, and is a handy bogey-man to shake at the Russian people. Then again, the missile base is just a beachhead for the coming horde of NATO forces that will soon be bristling on Russia's border, so the Kremlin's alarm at the placement is not just rabble-rousing. And of course, there is also the fact that the missile base could easily accomodate offensive weapons as well as the boondoggled duds. The threat to Russia from U.S. missiles and NATO encroachments is considerably more real and substantial than the idea that Russia poses any kind of genuine threat to America.
To be sure, Russia, and China, do pose a genuine threat to the American elite's idiotic, arrogant agenda of forcing its will on the entire world. Thus the frothing nonsense and belligerent posturing -- and murderous military adventures -- of our bipartisan foreign policy establishment will go on. But as we've often noted here before, none of this has anything to do with the genuine interests or well-being or security of the American people. That is just not "a question of interest" to our moneyed elites and our ludicrous, "purpose-driven" politicians.
An ex-Hitler Youth certainly knows a thing or two about fascism -- so when Pope Benedict XVI weighed in with a warning about the resurgent state-backed racism and repression in the birthplace of the pernicious right-wing doctrine last Sunday, it provoked a firestorm in Italian politics.
As we have noted here earlier, that ever-indictable oligarch, Silvio Berlusconi, is back in power once again, and once again he is leading a coalition of corporate cronies, rabid nationalists and factions that proudly proclaim their descent from Benito Mussolini's original fascist party. This time around -- in the brave new post-9/11 world, where Western "democracies" no longer have to disguise their authoritarian tendencies but instead boldly embrace lawless "unitary executive" powers and police-state tactics -- the balding, preening ass of Rome is stepping out in his true colors: basic blackshirt.
At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi's new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country's estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy's three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country....
Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. [More on the Camorra's increasing symbiosis with the state here.] The response of Berlusconi's government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? "That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies," shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: "The people do what the political class isn't able to do."
Berlusconi and his neo-fascists routinely make great shows of their deep Catholic piety. (Thank God religion is not cynically exploited in American politics!) But now the Pope -- who as young Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth then served briefly in the armed forces of Nazi Germany, apparently in a non-combatant role -- has thrown his weight behind a campaign by Italy's top Catholic weekly, Famiglia Cristiana. The Guardian has the story:
In an editorial on Friday, condemning recent government moves against immigrants and Roma, the magazine said it was to be hoped fascism was not "resurfacing in our country under another guise". The jibe outraged Berlusconi's supporters, many of whom are themselves pious Catholics.
The leader of his parliamentary group in the upper house, Maurizio Gasparri, announced he would personally sue the priest who is Famiglia Cristiana's editor while the junior minister with responsibility for family affairs, Carlo Giovanardi, said the magazine was "possessed by ideological malice".
At first Vatican spokemen tried to soothe the troubled waters with a statement that the magazine did not speak for the Pope. But two days later, Herr Ratzinger delivered an address that clearly backed the magazine's message:
Silvio Berlusconi's government was today engaged in a vigorous damage limitation exercise after Pope Benedict appeared to lend his immense moral authority to speculation that Italy was in danger of returning to fascism under the tycoon's hardline, rightwing leadership.
In his customary midday Sunday address, the pontiff expressed concern at "recent examples of racism" and reminded Catholics it was their duty to steer others in society away from "racism, intolerance and [the] exclusion [of others]"....The pope's comments were interpreted by Berlusconi's critics as a signal that the Vatican was not climbing down or distancing itself from Famiglia Cristiana's interpretation.
Benedict cited in his address the story from Matthew's gospel of Jesus's encounter with a pagan woman and how he rose above his initial misgivings to perform a miracle for her daughter.
The pope said: "One of humanity's great conquests is indeed the overcoming of racism. Unfortunately, however, there are new and worrying examples of this in various countries, often linked to social and economic problems that nonetheless can never justify contempt or racial discrimination."
The paper notes a further irony. The Vatican -- led by perhaps the most conservative pope in the last century, a man who once headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (once better known as the Inquisition) -- has mounted a much stronger resistance to Berlusconi's blackshirtism than the political opposition:
So far, church leaders have been far more outspoken in their criticism of the government's policies than Italy's main, centre-left opposition party. Earlier this month, they succeeded in blocking an attempt by the mayor of Rome to pass a measure - seemingly aimed at Gypsies - that banned people from rummaging in garbage containers. In June, Famiglia Cristiana said a government plan to take the fingerprints of Roma children was "indecent".
God knows, one hates to agree with Herr Ratzinger about anything. As The Times noted shortly before his election in 2005: "His condemnations are legion — of women priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has declared to be suffering from an 'objective disorder.'" Of course, Ratzinger is not actually any more hardline and draconian than his predecessor, the media celebrity John Paul II -- after all, it was JP2 who installed Ratzinger as the enforcer of the faith in 1981 and backed his strictures right down the line.
But the Pope's intervention on behalf of the scapegoats of crony capitalism -- not only in Italy, but around the world, where corrupt and greedy elites increasingly try to hide the ruin they have made of their own nations by pointing the finger at Evil Others -- is most welcome.
When it comes to determining the true thrust and implication of world events, the old adage is still valid: "Follow the money."
The lust for long green is not the sole determinant of state policies, of course. For example, there are also the psychosexual anxieties of blustering elites, the soul-corroding pathology of political ambition, the ignorance and arrogance of the powerful and the privileged, the herd instinct that can drive whole populations into self-deluding frenzies of nationalistic fervor -- all kinds of factors in the mix. But money is never not in the center of things.
This is especially true in systems where war and rumors of war have become the foundation of the national economy. This is the ultimate condition of every empire (or rather the penultimate position; the ultimate position is the inevitable decline and fall). And the United States, with its globe-spanning military empire, is no exception. Here we have a nation that has stripped its own industrial base, brutally neglected its educational system, allowed its physical infrastructure to rot, and driven its small-holding farmers from the land, dispossessing its own citizens and degrading their communities, all for the short-term profit of a moneyed elite -- and, what's more, has based its prosperity on the profligate and disproportionate use of a finite resource which it cannot produce in sufficient quantities within its own borders.
Andrew Bacevich discusses this latter point this way in his new book, The Limits of Power, in a passage picked out by Bill Moyers which puts the American people in the frame along with our predatory elite:
"The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad."
The decades-long quest for military-enforced dominance of geopolitical affairs has been both producer and product of this ravenous system. And now, the war machine is pretty much the only thing left. It has eaten all our seed corn, and must keep prowling constantly in foreign lands to feast on the resources of others. So war and the ever-present threat of war will continue to be the driving forces of American policy, at home and abroad, both in the public and private sectors – because that's where the money is. Big money, gargantuan money, money out the wazoo. And what's more, it's free money – because most of it comes from the taxpayers, through insider sweetheart deals that very often guarantee profits for the crony contractor. No muss, no fuss, no risk – just gravy.
And so the Russian response to Georgia's attack on South Ossetia – "Six Days That Changed the World!" as the deathless (or rather, death-filled) headlines proclaim – has been the usual win-win situation for the war-profiteers in the cockpit of the American corruptocracy, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The Journal writes for those who really count in American society – the movers and shakers and shifters of Big Money – so you can often get a better analysis of what's really going on than you would from, say, the New York Times, with all its weighty think-tank lumber. The headline from Saturday's WSJ story says it all: Attack on Georgia Gives Boost To Big U.S. Weapons Programs.
Just as the rash and bloody deed of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili – who assaulted South Ossetia in a ferocious sneak attack -- gave the Kremlin war machine the excuse it needed to flex its muscles, so the Russian response has been a godsend for the Pentagon. Now you see why we need all them big new weapons we've been hankering for, say the boys from Hell's Bottom: we got to keep them Russkies down. And of course, in keeping with the noble tradition of our bipartisan foreign policy establishment, a top Democrat (an erstwhile hero of the "anti-war" movement, no less), is in the forefront of the Pentagon's fear-mongering gobble at the pork barrel. From the Journal:
Russia's attack on Georgia has become an unexpected source of support for big U.S. weapons programs, including flashy fighter jets and high-tech destroyers, that have had to battle for funding this year because they appear obsolete for today's conflicts with insurgent opponents.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has spent much of the year attempting to rein in some of the military's most expensive and ambitious weapons systems -- like the $143 million F-22 Raptor jet -- because he thinks they are unsuitable for the lightly armed and hard-to-find militias, warlords and terrorist groups the U.S. faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been opposed by an array of political interests and defense companies that want to preserve these multibillion-dollar programs and the jobs they create.
When Russia's invading forces choked roads into Georgia with columns of armored vehicles and struck targets from the air, it instantly bolstered the case being made by some that the Defense Department isn't taking the threat from Russia and China seriously enough. If the conflict in Georgia continues and intensifies, it could make it easier for defense companies to ensure the long-term funding of their big-ticket items.
For example, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. John Murtha, quickly seized on the Russia situation this week, saying that it indicates the Russians see the toll that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking on the U.S. military. "We've spent so many resources and so much attention on Iraq that we've lost sight of future threats down the road. The current conflict between Russia and Georgia is a perfect example," said Rep. Murtha during a recent visit to his district.
Go tell it, Brother John! Ivan's on the march, and he's headed straight for downtown Latrobe. If we don't get them Raptors up pronto, they'll be dishing up borschtburgers at McDonald's next week. [Bernard Chazelle has a somewhat different take on Russia's motivations over at A Tiny Revolution.]
But behind all the bull-roaring in the Beltway, the Journal cuts to the chase with admirable dispatch:
Some Wall Street stock analysts early on saw the invasion as reason to make bullish calls on the defense sector. A report from JSA Research in Newport, R.I., earlier in the week called the invasion "a bell-ringer for defense stocks."
…The change in administration [after the 2008 election] comes at a time of record profits and sales in the industry, reflecting historic highs in defense spending. Yet budget pressure is already undeniable. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan require laying out almost $12 billion a month and the Pentagon faces a massive tab for repairing and overhauling equipment when troops start coming home.
Now, the Russian situation makes the debate over the equipping of the U.S. military a front-burner issue. "The threat always drives procurement," said a defense-industry official. "It doesn't matter what party is in office."
And here our candid if unnamed war-profit maven has neatly encapsulated both the last century of American policy – and the next century as well: "The threat always drives procurement. It doesn't matter what party is in office." His vatic pronouncement should be emblazoned on billboards, streamed constantly beneath the natterers on TV news, and chiseled in marble on the Capitol Dome. For it is, in a very real sense, what America is about today: Threat. War. Procurement. Profit.
And never doubt the bipartisan nature of this self-devouring system. For even as Democratic "anti-war" icon John Murtha is saber-rattling at Moscow, Democratic "anti-war" icon Barack Obama is saber-rattling at Tehran in the official party platform that his aides have just completed. As Jonathan Schwarz reports, Obama's platform insists that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program – despite the finding by the Bush Administration's own intelligence agencies that it does not. And of course, it goes without saying that this non-existent program is such an overwhelming threat that Obama has pledged that he will be – wait for it – "keeping all options on the table." From Schwarz (see original for links):
Sure, America's intelligence agencies concluded last year December that Iran no longer has a nuclear weapons program. But what do they know? Surely the Democratic Party is far more informed about the situation than them, which is why the Democrats refer to Iran's "nuclear weapons program" in their just-finalized 2008 platform:
Prevent Iran from Acquiring Nuclear Weapons The world must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That starts with tougher sanctions and aggressive, principled, and direct high-level diplomacy, without preconditions…. We will present Iran with a clear choice: if you abandon your nuclear weapons program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, you will receive meaningful incentives; so long as you refuse, the United States and the international community will further ratchet up the pressure, with stronger unilateral sanctions; stronger multilateral sanctions inside and outside the U.N. Security Council, and sustained action to isolate the Iranian regime… By going the extra diplomatic mile, while keeping all options on the table, we make it more likely the rest of the world will stand with us to increase pressure on Iran, if diplomacy is failing.
Note also that the Democrats are going to be "keeping all options on the table." I've always wondered whether this phrase includes the possibility of America and Israel giving up all their nuclear weapons. I mean, that's an option—surely if all options on the table, that means our complete nuclear disarmament is there on the table with all the rest of them.
So the beat – and the beat-downs – will keep going on, around the world, and fear will keep driving procurement, no matter what party is in office. As long as we want to guzzle and glut and "project dominance" in every corner of the world, war is all we've got.
First Georgia, now Poland. The Bush Administration announced Thursday that American soldiers will begin manning missile sites in Poland -- part of an agreement that surpasses even the NATO treaty in binding Washington to an armed response to any attack on Polish soil.
Spokesminions for President George Butt-Thumper said the installation of the missile base is designed to protect Poland from an intercontinental missile attack from Iran. (The perfidious Persians' long-standing plans to conquer Poland are well-known, of course.) The minions say that the missiles and troops are not at all intended as a threat to Russia, which is being slowly encircled by NATO bases and American missiles -- despite solemn promises from Washington to refrain from, er, encircling Russia with NATO bases and American missiles.
But while Butt-Thumper was playing coy about the latest interjection of American cannon fodder into the now-roiling region, the Poles were admirably frank: they wanted a signed, ironclad deal that would force Americans to fight for them -- unlike the hapless Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili, who depended on a nod and a wink from militarist factions along the Potomac (apparently John McCain and his neocon crowd) when launching his own sneak attack on South Ossetia. [Justin Raimondo has more on this.]
As we all know, Misha was left up Saakashvili Creek without a paddle when the U.S. cavalry failed to ride to his rescue as expected. (Can there be any other explanation as to why he would launch his tiny military on a reckless adventure that was certain to provoke a massive Russian response? Obviously he thought Uncle Butt-Thumper would back him up.)
But there was none of that boneheaded shilly-shally for the Poles. They took advantage of the Bush Regime's panicky anxiety to look big and tough in front of the Russians and quickly sealed the missile base deal, wringing concessions that Washington had been resisting for 18 months.
The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, put plainly what his country wanted out of the agreement: “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later — it is no good when assistance comes to dead people. Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of — knock on wood — any possible conflict.”
Poland has an understandable fear of Russia, which has invaded and occupied its territory several times -- most recently, of course, in collaboration with the Bush Family's old business partners, Nazi Germany. Then again, Poland invaded and occupied Russia a few times too, back when it was a major power. Major powers tend to do that kind of thing. Which is why, as I noted in a recent comment exchange, one should be eternally suspicious of any person or group who takes control of massive, inhuman structures like states, because of our common human propensity to abuse power -- and to justify those abuses by claiming they are done in the name of some higher ideal. This applies no matter what system a particular state is based upon: capitalism, communism, theocracy -- or the grotesque chimera that now holds sway in both the United States and Russia: lawless, militarist authoritarian corporate-cronyism.
An American military move into Poland is the height of folly -- then again, we have been living on those dizzy heights for a number of years now, so there's nothing new in that.
But speaking of business partners, so much of the current unpleasantness would never have arisen if the dastard Putin had not begun hoarding Russia's natural resources for his cronies instead of giving it away to Butt-Thumper's buds. One recalls those halcyon days of yore when BP and Shell were striking fat oil and gas deals with Russian partners. Back then, Putin was Butt-Thumper's "soulmate," invited down for barbecues in Crawford. Back then, Putin was praised in the American media as the strong, steady hand that Russia needed, "a man we can do business with." Back then, Putin's astonishingly savage rampage through Chechnya and his installation of a regime of brutal thugs to preside over its remains were lauded as part of the war against Islamofascist terror.
But that was then and this is now. In the past few years, as the Kremlin has tightened its grip on Russia's oil and gas reserves and its indispensable pipelines to Europe, as it has grown rich from the spike in oil prices sparked by Bush's wars and threats of war, as its has rolled back Big Oil's presence in Russia -- often in harsh and humiliating ways -- Putin has steadily emerged in Western eyes as a tyrant, a bully, an ogre who threatens the stability of the entire world. (How long will it be before he is dubbed "the New Hitler"?)
The actual nature of Putin's regime has never mattered to our freedom-loving elites. The only "foreign policy" question they have is this: "Will they play ball? Will they fork over?" If Putin had only let the Western elite have a nice juicy slice of the Russian pie -- and maybe joined in one or two of Butt-Thumper's wars -- why, he could have romped and scampered around the region all he liked. But he didn't, and so now we have a "new Cold War," with Washington pouring oil on the fires in the Caucus and stirring the embers of fear and suspicion on the Russian-Polish frontier.
What next? Landing an expeditionary force in Vladivostok?
UPDATE: As'ad AbuKhalil weighs in with these observations (in separate posts, here and here):
My favorite thing about the whole coverage of the Georgia situation in the U.S. is the way the White House and media are feigning outrage over Russian actions. They just are aghast that a country can send its troops (across the border) under pretext of national security and defense. I mean, the U.S. would never ever send troops, say 10, 000 miles away from its border, under those pretexts. Never.
If I were Putin, I would have toppled the Georgian government, and installed a puppet government and then I would have said: We are here in Georgia at the invitation of the "democratically-elected" government of Georgia, and we will stay in Georgia as long as we are needed, and not one day longer. And I will make decisions on the basis of my military commanders on the ground, and in consultation with the new government of Georgia."
Time pressures preclude proper blogging today, but as our astute commenter Scott Douglas notes, Seamus Milne has an excellent commentary on Georgia and Russia in today's Guardian, so I'm just going to expropriate great swathes of it here:
The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered". George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic government". Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st century".
Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon's infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers?
You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order" - in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union.....
Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy". Well it's certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution". Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases.
The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.
Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo - whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - and conflict was only a matter of time.
The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq - hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close...[See our previous post on this subject here.]
But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence secretary under Bush's father [more on this here], but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.
Over the past decade, Nato's relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia's borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.
By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power....
Ah yes, but "sensible reckonings" are in short supply these days, especially among the courtiers and scribes of the Potomac Empire. Bush's insertion of American troops into Georgia, ostensibly to deliver humanitarian aid, is a dangerous and completely unnecessary intervention. (Is it really not possible to get humanitarian aid into a European country without U.S. military assistance?) It also a perfect illustration of Milne's observation of the obvious fact that American foreign policy is driven by the elite's compulsion for "unipolar domination" of world affairs, as we noted here yesterday.
You can see this in the braggadocio of a "senior Pentagon official" who inadvertantly gave the game away about the true nature of the "humanitarian" mission. He told the New York Times that the "relief effort" was meant to "show to Russia that we can come to the aid of a European ally, and that we can do it at will, whenever and wherever we want."
This is not the language of sober professionals guiding the affairs of a great nation, but the schoolyard bluster of two-bit bullies, seeking to allay their own weakness and anxiety with apish displays of force.
II. But while Bush and Co. strut and swagger with tough Cold War talk aimed at Russia, their ongoing destruction of the American Republic continues unabated -- assisted, as it has been every step of the way, by the very institutions that are meant to preserve American liberty and keep a check on tyranny.
Winter Patriot has the goods on a recent federal court ruling that absolves all government personnel of guilt for any crime they may commit on the public payroll. As WP notes, the ruling goes beyond the "Nuremberg defense" favored by Nazis and accomplices in crime and atrocity the world over -- "I was only following orders" -- to add a whole new line of justification: "I was only giving orders."
The ruling, by Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle -- a long-time right-wing apparatchik -- must be seen to be believed. As Reuters reports:
Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.
"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.
WP's excellent analysis of the ruling and its implications should be read in full. But here is a taste, from his conclusion:
So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.
Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?
And these are the people who preach to the world about democracy and freedom and rule of law.
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood to Richard Ryckoff --
Smedley Butler talked about that thing you're observing, as did Ike Eisenhower on his last speech as POTUS. Many since those two have commented on the fraud of Star Wars, not the least of which is the problem of space junk pi...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism Say what you will about America (and I'm not an American fanboy, wingnut or liberal), at least it doesn't have the kind of openly and unapologetic, far-right, fascist, racist political parties that actually win elections and seats that Europe does. ...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism Say what you will about America (and I'm not an American fanboy, wingnut or liberal), at least it doesn't have the kind of openly and unapologetic, far-right, fascist, racist political parties that actually win elections and seats that Europe does. ...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism Nice summary Chris. Dan Mcdougall at the Guardian has more on the two Gypsy children that drowned. An excerpt:
[url]http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18475[/url]
[quote]On the morning of 17 July, Cristina and Violetta, along with the...
Any Pope in a Storm: Benny Bashes Berlusconi's Neo-Fascism "He may be a bastard murderous pope, but he's *our* bastard murderous pope"
Now if we could just get him to adjudicate (pontificate?) how many houses Jesus owned, we could work out whether he was elitist or not.
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood Government by insiders. Government as "this thing of ours." You in on this thing? You're set for life. You outside this thing? Listen, you and your grandkids have got to pay for this thing. It sure ain't free.
Great bubbling chunks of the American p...
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood Suggestion: Gather all the wives and children of all Raytheon staff and shareholders at 870 Winter Street
Waltham, MA 02451, and invite the Russians to lob a few ICBMs at that target. Then we will know how effective Patriot missiles are, and how safe...
Priming the Pump With Missle Defense: Empty Gestures Full of Blood Paul Craig Roberts recently published a piece in which he tells that his graduate-school mentor told him point-blank that foreign countries do Uncle Sam's bidding because Uncle Sam pays them to do so. The example he offered is Tony Blair, who, even t...
Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph and the Hard Way Ahead
Sunday, 02 September 2007
Put your hand on my head, baby; Do I have a temperature? I see people who ought to know better Standing around like furniture. There's a wall between you And what you want -- you got to leap it. Tonight you got the power to take it; Tomorrow you won't have the power to keep it. -- Bob Dylan
I. Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.
The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003 aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped again by its "rescuers" after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.
The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.
The war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet -- more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen -- and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those "strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now praising the "military success" of the Iraq escalation -- despite the evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political cohesion and regional stability. This emerging "bipartisan consensus" on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the September "progress report" will be greeted as a justification for continuing the "surge" in one form or another.
It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest political feats ever. Despite Bush's standing as one of the most despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation's infrastructure and the callous abandonment of one of the nation's major cities to natural disaster and crony greed -- despite all of this, and much more that would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger position than it was a year ago.
How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.
It is well-nigh impossible to imagine a force in American public life today rising up to thwart the Administration's will on any element of its militarist and corporatist agenda, including the arbitrary launch of an attack on Iran. What's more, even if some institution had the will -- and made the effort -- to balk Bush, it wouldn't matter. As the New York Times noted a couple of weeks ago:
…Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.
At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”
Thus the Administration's own spokesmen are now saying openly, in plain English, what they once only insinuated beneath layers of legal jargon: that the president of the United States does not have to obey the law of the land. He does not have to obey acts passed by Congress. He is free to act arbitrarily, to do anything whatsoever that he claims is necessary to "defend national security," in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There is literally nothing anyone can do – not Congress, not the courts – to stop him.
That is Bush's claim -- and it has been accepted. The American Establishment has surrendered to an authoritarian takeover of the American state. If this was not the case, then Bush and Cheney would have been impeached long ago (or least months ago) for their treason against the Constitution, their coup d'etat against the Republic. At the very least, they would have been mocked, scorned, censured and shunned for their ludicrous and dangerous pretensions to royal power. All manner of institutional, legal and political fetters would have been put upon them, as happened in the last days of Richard Nixon's presidency.
Instead, Bush's power has only grown with each new outrageous claim of unchallengeable presidential authority. It is too little understood how vital -- and how fatal -- Congress' acquiescence in all of this has been. By continuing to treat the Bush Administration as a legitimate government, to carry on with business as usual instead of initiating impeachments or refusing to cooperate with a gang of usurpers, Congress instead confirms the New Order day after day. Some Democrats may grumble, whine or bluster -- but they DO nothing, and their very participation in the sinister farce ensures its continuance.
Again, look at the facts, the reality: Bush wants Congressional approval of his illegal surveillance; he gets it. Bush wants to launch spy satellites against the American people; he does it. Bush wants concentration camps and secret prisons with torture; he's got them. Bush wants to escalate a ruinous, murderous, unpopular war; he does it. He wants to declare people "enemy combatants" and imprison them indefinitely; he does it. Bush's spokesmen openly claim that the laws passed by the people's representatives are "just advisory" and "the president can still do whatever he wants to do," and there is no outcry, no action, no defense of the Republic against this overthrow of the Constitution.
Who could look at this reality and declare that the United States is still a republic, in any genuine form? Who could see this and deny that the nation is now an authoritarian state under an "elected" dictator?
Those who insist on seeing the current situation as "politics as usual" (even if an extreme version of it) will point to peripheral elements that still retain some of the flavor of the old order: such as the Justice Department scandal, with its forced resignations and Congressional probes, or the occasional criminal trial of Bush Regime minions like Scooter Libby. Some will say such things are proof that we don't really live under tyranny, that deep down, the "system works."
But all of this is indeed "politics as usual" -- the kind of politics that occurs under every system of rule. Even the Caesars were subject to such pressures, forced to remove (and sometimes execute) officials who had become too controversial due to scandal, crime, corruption or factional opposition, or even unpopularity with "the rabble." Sometimes the Caesars themselves were removed for such causes -- but the tyrannical system went on. Likewise, the kings and queens of England in their autocratic heyday were forced to give up ministers -- even court favorites -- due to similar pressures. And so too the Russian czars, the Chinese emperors, the Persian monarchs, the Muslim Caliphs, the Egyptian pharaohs, etc. Even Hitler was sometimes thwarted or hampered in his polices by factional strife or public displeasure. "Politics" does not disappear in undemocratic regimes. It is a function of human relations, and carries on regardless of the political system imposed on a society. Yet the belief persists that if there are not tanks in the streets or leather-jacketed commissars breaking down doors, then Americans are still living in a free country. I wrote about this situation almost six years ago -- six years ago:
It won't come with jackboots and book burnings, with mass rallies and fevered harangues. It won't come with "black helicopters" or tanks on the street. It won't come like a storm – but like a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality has taken its place.
As in Rome, all the old forms will still be there: legislatures, elections, campaigns – plenty of bread and circuses for the folks. But the "consent of the governed" will no longer apply; actual control of the state will have passed to a small group of nobles who rule largely for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons.
To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among this elite, and a degree of free debate will be permitted, within limits; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to govern or influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized – usually by "the people" themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by an impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, not thoughtful citizens, and left ignorant of current events by a media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control.
The rulers will often act in secret; for reasons of "national security," the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, the murder of "enemies" selected by the leader, undeclared war, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new "security structures" targeted at the populace. In time, all this will come to seem "normal," as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone."
This was written less than two months after 9/11. I was no prophet, no shaman; I had no inside knowledge or special expertise. I was just an ordinary American citizen reading news reports, articles, essays and books easily available to the general public. But even then it was crystal clear what was happening, and where it would lead if left unchecked. As we now know, it was not only left unchecked, it was exacerbated and accelerated and countenanced at every turn, by virtually every element and institution in American public life.
II. "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." – Thoreau
Now from all this, what follows?
The time has passed for ordinary political opposition, "within the system." The system itself has been perverted and converted into something else; it is now impossible to "work within the system" in the old understanding of that term, because that old system is gone. To work within the current system is to collaborate with evil, to give it legitimacy.
Thoreau's answer should be taken up by every person in public life, beginning with the Senators and Representatives in Congress, and radiating outward to all other elected officials in the 50 states, and to civil servants and other government employees, law enforcement agencies, judges, universities, contractors, banks, and on and on, throughout the vast, intricate web that binds the lives of so many people directly to the federal government. There should be non-compliance, non-recognition of this illegitimate authority, disassociation from taking part in its workings.
But we must also recognize that the kind of civil disobedience that Thoreau preached – and practiced – is immensely more difficult today, because the power of the state is so much greater, far more pervasive, more invasive…and much more implacable, more inhuman. No one would have dared put Thoreau in "indefinite detention" without charges, or torture him, or delegate some underling in intelligence apparatus (which didn't exist then) to kill him as a "suspected terrorist." Of course there were many egregious suspensions of Constitutional liberties and draconian measures during the Civil War; but these occasioned fierce fights in Congress, investigations, lawsuits, and outraged protests on the streets – the worst, by far, in American history, dwarfing the urban riots and war protests of the Sixties. But only the most ignorant fool – or devious liar – could compare these short-lived, ad hoc, inconsistently applied, frequently reversed and much-disputed depredations, carried out in the midst of a massive insurrection by fully-fledged armies on American soil, with today's thorough-going, systematic creation of an authoritarian state, on the basis of a zealous ideology of an unrestricted "unitary executive," operating in a nebulous, self-declared "state of war" that we are told will last for generations.
Neither Thoreau – nor any Northern opponent of the Civil War – confronted anything like this. (In fact, neither did the insurrectionists of the South, who were treated as lawful prisoners-of-war when captured – or often simply allowed to return to their homes on parole, in exchange for a simple statement that they would fight no more. No Southerner was ever subjected to indefinite detention, none were tortured, none were liquidated by secret agents.) The technology available to the government today amplifies the scope of repression immeasurably, both in the pinpoint, surreptitious targeting of individuals and in larger-scale operations.
In a land crawling with armed – and armored – SWAT teams, with operatives from innumerable federal agencies packing heat and happy to use it, a land where more than 2 million people languish in prison (many of them captives of an endless "war on drugs" that has done nothing to curb substance abuse but has greatly augmented the power of the state and the criminal gangs whose laundered money enriches Establishment elites), a land where almost every transaction is wired up to some national grid, where national ID cards are now being imposed – a land where you literally cannot exist without placing your liberty, your privacy, your very life at the mercy of a government apparatus besotted with violence, coercion and intrusion, there is no place left for the kind of action that Thoreau advocated. His way – and that of Gandhi and King, who took so much from him – envisions a state opponent which one could hope to shame into honorable action by the superior moral force of principled civil disobedience. But the very hallmark of the present regime is its shamelessness, its utter lack of any sense of honor or principle, its bestial addiction to raw power.
It is pointless – and counterproductive – to simply throw yourself under the wheels of such a monstrous machine in futile spasms of rage and despair. The machine doesn't care. It will gladly chew up your life and move on. For the action of the ordinary individual to have an effect, it must be amplified by a larger social movement. And it is difficult to imagine such a movement arising in America today, in a society atomized by the engines of profiteering, its communities gutted or abandoned by elites seeking greener pastures – and cheaper labor – elsewhere, its citizens isolated from one another, locked in their own bubbles of electronic diversion, and their own struggles to keep their jobs (unprotected by unions, subject to the arbitrary whim of local bosses, or faceless corporate masters, or predatory hedge funds, etc.), hang on to their health insurance (if they've got it), and stay out of the hell created by the bipartisan Bankruptcy Bill for the benefit of the credit card companies.
And despite the deep unpopularity of the regime, there is still a widespread reluctance to recognize its true nature, and what it will require to restore our constitutional republic. And truth to tell, there are a great many people uninterested in doing so. As long as the diversions keep pouring through the latest gadgetry, the monthly paycheck manages to cover the bills, and their own bodies are not subjected to the tyrant's evil, many people are happy to accept the authoritarian system. (This is not unique to Americans, of course; it is a constant in human history.) But even where there is an interest in discerning the reality of our times, and a yearning for change, again there is no broader movement to leverage an individual's dissent into a form large enough to thwart the tyrannical machine. And there is no American Sakharov on the horizon, someone to arise from the very center of the machine to denounce its workings and call for genuine liberty, genuine democracy, genuine economic and social justice.
So whatever we can do, we must do it ourselves. If we have no power or influence, if we cannot take large actions, then we must take small ones. Every word or action raised against the overthrow of the Republic will find an echo somewhere, from one person to another to another to the next -- each isolated, individual voice slowly finding its way into a swelling chorus of dissent.
It might be too late. It might not work. But failure – and much more horror -- is guaranteed if we don't even try.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote – in a context that is growing less dissimilar all the time: -- it is impossible that evil should not come into the world; but take care that it does not enter through you.
"What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret." –Thoreau.
Allow me once again to present my profound respect and compliments, as ever, to one of our finest writers and minds. I visit your site daily, if only for the chance to reassure myself that I haven't either gone insane from some poisoned Paisano, or awakened to find myself, in a country which, as Vonnegut said, "...might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers." I've lived through 56 years of our history, and NEVER dreamed (nightmared?) I would see this disgrace, this rampant treason, this shameless catalogue of the most atrocious crimes, or that I see Congress become nothing more than a Vichy government of rubber-stamping whores. I come here to stay sane, I guess. You reassure me I'm not the only one who sees the true face of Evil, the bottomless pit of horror these vampires and gangsters have unleashed upon the world. And nobody has done a thing to stop it. Now, I don't think it can be stopped anymore. The horrific political/economic momentum created by the junta must play itself out to the end. The tragedy is, they're going to take the world down in flames with them, unlike the fall of previous Empires.
I am afraid of a lot of my neighbors. The neighbors that would tend to lean to my point of view of things are afraid of me, because I've openly dissented over these years.
I was in the belly of the beast on 9/11, teaching math to West Point cadets on that fateful day. I knew something was wrong - very, very wrong - with our nation, but at that time I did not appreciate the level of corruption that pervades all our institutions, the sheer scope of the evil that manifests itself in every one of our interactions with a society that has truly gone to hell. It has been a long six years, and I have learned a very great deal. Much of my knowledge has come from reading Chris Floyd's works, and so to him I owe a great debt of gratitude.
The only way in which one can repay such a debt is to use the knowledge gained in order to benefit others. I find it fitting that, in the current article, Floyd makes repeated references to Thoreau, a man who should be a hero to us all, one who set the example for moral opposition in the face of overwhelming evil. I am no longer in academia, and am no longer working for this totalitarian regime in any capacity, thus I feel free to lend my voice, however tiny, to the small yet growing chorus calling for the restoration of the Constitutional republic. For my part, I know that I can no longer allow myself to be cowed by the silence of those whom I know who remain in the system, who would cast a disapproving glare upon anyone who would disrupt the apple cart, and deprive them of their share of bread and circuses.
When I write the following, I write it to myself as much as to anyone else, knowing my own weaknesses: Let us not shirk from this responsibility, heavy though it weigh upon us, even if each of us should find ourselves alone in what seems a Sisyphean task. For if we do not stand - alone, if need be - we shall fall together, never to rise again.
Thank you, Chris, for the continuing inspiration you provide.
A lot of people argue about Bush's legacy. How will history perceive him? I've had a word or two to say about that myself on occasion but I think now that it's clearer than ever before: However many millions he has killed or will kill, however much he and his have stolen, however badly he may have loused up the world, on positive thing he has accomplished: George W. Bush has ripped the wraps off of the American Dream and exposed it for precisely what it is and always has been.
Chris is surely right about the impossibility of achieving change from within the American fascist system. Chris is wrong, I think, to say that Bush is the one who made it impossible. Change -- meaningful, positive change -- has been impossible in America at least since the death of JFK and probably, I think, since the onset of World War Two.
The assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, the police riots in Chicago in 1968, the murders at Kent State, all of those events were political spasms, the death throes of American democracy. All of the people who divorced themselves from radicalism after Chicago, those who vowed to "work for change within the system," are today those Democrats who six years ago bought American fascism as a concept and now (not to put words in Chris's mouth) have sold their country to corporate murderers.
Was it Country Joe MacDonald? No! It was Funkadelic who, in 1972, named their latest album "America Eats its Young." The title was keenly perceptive, as time has shown. American fascism has consumed Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and many, many others.
There is no stopping it now, as Chris has written. It will run its course however long that takes, becoming worse and ever worse until eventually, as it did in Germany, Italy and Japan, it consumes itself by bringing the weight of the world down upon its own greedy, murderous head.
All we can hope for is to survive the deluge and that George W. Bush, by finally laying bare the American Dream and burying our constitutional republic, will sow the seeds of his own destruction and -- all unawares -- pave the way for peace on earth.
When it comes to determining the true thrust and implication of world events, the old adage is still valid: "Follow the money."
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