There is no shortage of books these days analyzing what contemporary U.S. society gets wrong: Illegal wars of aggression, a cavalier attitude toward potential ecological collapse, narrow-minded religious fundamentalism, widening economic inequality, and lingering racism, sexism, and homophobia. Look too closely at this society, beyond the self-congratulatory triumphalism, and it’s not such a pretty picture.

But one of the criteria on which the United States ranks high in the world is legal protection for freedom of expression. Our legal regime built on the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of speech and press is not perfect, but over time the scope of real expressive liberty has expanded, as popular movements and progressive legal thinkers have demanded that liberty and crafted the rules for making it real in day-to-day life.

That’s why Ronald K.L. Collins’ and David M. Skover’s The Death of Discourse is so chilling: The book details why our traditional approach to freedom of expression — the ideas that led to this expansion of liberty, ideas that are admirable in so many ways — is ill-equipped to cope with either the contemporary challenges we face or the future. In fact, this traditional approach to freedom of expression may well be hastening the collapse of the culture.

Could it really be that grim? Is this the nature of the modern crisis: Even what we have learned do well is going to contribute to our demise? When the first edition of the book was published in 1996, my answer was a painful, but tentative, yes. As the updated edition is published, I am ready to drop the tentativeness. Collins and Skover identify a key question in mass media, law, and philosophy that we can no longer afford to ignore: Has this system of freedom of expression, when combined with a predatory capitalism, made it more difficult to maintain a healthy and sustainable culture?

As they phrase the questions: “If today’s First Amendment represents a way of life, what kind of life? If it represents freedom, what kind of freedom? And if it represents the triumph of democracy, what kind of democracy?”

My answers: An obscenely affluent way of life rooted in narrow conceptions of human flourishing; freedom defined in narrow terms by the pathological individualism of contemporary capitalism; and a democracy that is broad in theory but so narrow in practice that the majority of the population no longer takes electoral politics seriously

Collins and Skover explain that we face both Orwellian and the Huxleyan threats in the First Amendment arena. The former are rooted in the nightmare vision of the novel 1984, in which thought and expression are constrained by the direct repression of the state and no meaningful freedom is permitted. The latter describe the equally nightmarish vision of Brave New World, in which people are flooded with a pacifying array of amusements so that freedom becomes irrelevant.

Our First Amendment jurisprudence is rooted in the fear of that direct state repression, and for good reason; human history is replete with examples of that repression, including dramatic and recurring examples from U.S. history. Collins and Skover point out repeatedly that concerns about the use of state power against individuals and groups who dissent can never be ignored, and they re-emphasize the importance of that in the second edition, keeping in mind the post-9/11 experience of the Patriot Act and the Bush administration’s rejection of due process for thousands of prisoners in the United States and abroad.

So, without dismissing the threat of government suppression, they highlight the perhaps greater danger of a passive and placated public. While we have secured expansive rights against government repression: “Now our free speech system equates electronic self-amusement with enlightened civic education, the marketplace of items with the marketplace of ideas, and passionate self-gratification with political self-realization.”

Collins and Skover identify these primary threats:

1. “the difference between the old principles of political speech (rational decision-making, civic participation, meaningful dissent) and the new  practices of an electronic entertainment culture (trivialization, passivity, pleasure).”

Freedom of expression is crucial to self-government, but mass media have developed in ways that undermine people’s capacity to participate meaningfully in the formation public policy. That comes both from the flood of entertainment — the modern equivalent of the circus in “bread and circuses” — that so easily diverts people from the public arena, and the steady degradation of the intellectual level of so-called television journalism, especially on the cable talk shows.

2. “the difference between the informational principles of commercial speech (marketplace of economic ideas) and the imagistic practices of a mass commercial advertising culture (marketing of items).”

Whatever one’s evaluation of the morality or sustainability of capitalism, freedom of expression is crucial to a functioning market economy, but the manipulation industries (marketing, advertising, and public relations) undermine a real market system. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on commercial propaganda make a mockery of any notion of markets based on information and rational actors; the whole system is designed to suppress honest information and promote irrational behavior.

3. “the difference between the lofty principles of artistic expression (self-realization) and the low practices of a pornographic culture (self-gratification).”

Freedom of expression is crucial to self-realization and the exploration of the psychological and sexual, but the emergence of a mass-marketed pornography has led not to deeper understanding of those aspects of our lives but a coarsening and cheapening of intimacy.

Collins and Skover recount these threats honestly and recognize that we face a paradox, dilemma, and conundrum, which track with the three threats:

1. The paradox: “In the modern mass entertainment world, the traditional First Amendment may have to destroy itself to save itself. With governmental regulation of the amusement culture, First Amendment protection is likely to collapse into First Amendment tyranny. Without such control, First Amendment liberty is likely to collapse into First Amendment triviality.”

2. The dilemma: “In the commercial marketplace, communication in the service of sober economic reason is overwhelmed by communication in the service of compulsive pecuniary logic. To preserve reason in the marketplace, the First Amendment must steadfastly deny such protection for modern mass advertising. To preserve freedom in the marketplace, the First Amendment must zealously affirm laissez-faire values.”

3. The conundrum: “In pornutopia, deliberative discourse dies and is reincarnated as image-driven eroticism. On the one hand, governmental regulation to keep pornutopia at bay is likely to become increasingly futile. On the other hand, governmental indifference to the lure of pornutopia is likely to recast the First Amendment in wanton ways.”

The authors also do us the favor of admitting defeat in the face of these challenges. Rather than pretending there are easy resolutions, they leave readers to ponder the complexity of the questions and face the painful reality that there is no quick fix. This is not a set of problems that can be remedied by tweaking existing public policies. Instead, a conceptual revolution of sorts is needed, and to date no viable candidate for a new framework for the First Amendment is on the horizon. That may seem depressing, but better to understand the nature of the problem and acknowledge the limits of our current intellectual tools than to pretend that illusory solutions are real.

Though my own research and political activism dovetails with Collins’ and Skover’s thesis, I would offer two friendly amendments to the analysis.

First, a much clearer discussion of the nature of capitalism is necessary to launch that new conceptual framework. Here, the intellectual tools are in place from centuries of left critique. Simply put: Capitalism is inconsistent with democracy, sustainable economic activity, and the preservation of the best elements of human nature.

Capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system that inevitably concentrates power. Minor modifications in the system are possible to check the most grotesques abuses of that power, but in the end there can be no meaningful democracy in a corporate-capitalist society.

Capitalism is based on a notion of unlimited growth on a finite planet. Capitalist economic systems are not the only ones that have drastically drawn down the ecological capital of the planet, and again, minor modifications can be made to slow the assault on the biosphere. But in the end, capitalism is the end.

Capitalism draws out and rewards the worst aspects of human nature. We all are capable of a range of behaviors, and systems push people in specific directions. Capitalism pushes people toward greed, an obsession with a narrow concept of self-interest, and treatment of other people as objects.

In short, any serious discussion of what a system of freedom of expression might look like in a healthy, sustainable, fulfilling society must come to terms with the depravity of capitalism. The fact that we live in a society that has adopted precisely the opposite evaluation — every day extolling the alleged virtues of capitalism — simply means there is a lot of intellectual and political work to be done.

On the issue of pornography, Collins and Skover pay inadequate attention to the feminist critique of pornography that emerged in the 1980s. This perspective demonstrates that the threat of pornography (and of all the sexual exploitation industries, including stripping, prostitution, and sex trafficking) comes from the marriage of capitalism and patriarchy. That is, pornography does not exploit everyone equally; it is a reflection of a society that is rooted in the dynamic of male domination and female submission, and one of many practices that helps keep that dynamic in place. This is more readily evident today than when the first edition was published, as the products of the pornography industry have become steadily more degrading toward women in the presentation of a vision of male sexuality that is saturated in cruelty.

But these concerns are relatively small in the face of the service Collins and Skover have provided in The Death of Discourse. They not only face difficult realities but resist the temptation to imply there was a golden age in which all was well with the state of U.S. democracy and culture. But one need not pine for a non-existent golden age to see the contemporary threats. Yes, the use of bread and circuses to divert people is not new, nor is the domination of those who concentrate wealth, nor are the patriarchal gender relations at the heart of pornography. But the contemporary manifestations of these forces are troubling, not just because of the consequences in the world but also because of the culture’s unwillingness to confront the fundamental issues.

What is scary is not just that we face problems, but that so many people see the system that produces the problems as a grand and glorious success. Before a society can figure out solutions to problems, it has to recognize the nature of the systems that produce the problems.

The history of the First Amendment is a story of people bravely struggling against concentrated power to secure the blessings of liberty. The future of the First Amendment will depend on people being brave enough to confront the destructive forces inherent in the system.

Our First Amendment heroes of the past have been the radicals willing to stand up to the police officer’s clubs and risk jail. Their courage was admirable, and our debt to them is clear. Our First Amendment heroes of the future will no doubt someday be called upon to take radical actions, but it is difficult to anticipate those actions until we are further along in the conceptual revolution needed. Our first act of courage is to face honestly the state of the society.

These First Amendment struggles are not only crucial because of the centrality of expression in human life, but also because similar paradoxes, dilemmas, and conundrums are all around in political, economic, and social life. When we face them honestly, the triumphalism of the culture gives way quickly to a sinking feeling in our guts: We’re heading in the wrong direction, at increasingly rapid speed, with less and less time to change course. We face crises that demand a sense of urgency, yet also require a fundamental shift in the culture that can’t happen overnight. We need to act, now, but with an understanding that the necessary change is down a road that we have not yet built.

Those who continue to mouth the platitudes of the past will be quickly forgotten. Our future First Amendment heroes will be the people who help us find way through the challenges and onto that road.

——————-

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. 

As most of you have heard, Cindy Sheehan recently ‘resigned’ as the unofficial face of the anti-war movement. Her post Here at the Daily Kos will make you weep well-founded tears for this country.

My friend Maddi posted these bittersweet but moving and unfortunately accurate words in regards to Sheehan’s letter.

What a sad, sad statement from Cindy. That she sacrificed so much comes oozing through her words, and yet she exudes a “fire” which will never burn out. We the people in the United States have comfortized ourselves into no-think. How awful for us and for our kids and their kids. And yet, it is a good thing that Cindy finally realized all her standing and writing and urging and pushing and money was for naught. This country we all have loved is on the downhill slope we’ve been stuck on since shortly after the founders floundered. Which makes us flounderers of the 1000th degree. Her words also make me realize that we are not meant to proselytize nor drag the masses into our way of thought. That seems to be the fruitless way to go. The propaganda of right and left ultimately kills off ideas and spirits. In the stages of grief, and in the 10-step program that “Bill” started we might have some sparks that will light our ways. Who will find the many ways? Who will experiment? Who will step up to the plate with new ideas? Where are you hiding?

Maddi, Cindy Sheehan, and a growing number of others are coming to grips with something that I have been confronting for many years myself, some of which was apparant through the work with UnCommon Sense TV. Trying to do what one could, use what one could, use the resources available, to do anything possible to awaken a consciousness in people, in our fellow humans, to understand what is happening around them, to them, by them. This in order to address these critical problems before they became any worse, and caused any more damage and hurt than they already have.

But alas, there comes a time, filled with heartbreaking realization, that one can only truly help where the other is ready and open to being given those gifts of recognition and an authentic willingness to truly accept what is happening and what really needs to be done to make for a better life, a better world. And America is simply too deluded, too comfortable in its ways, and most importantly, too AFRAID to be able to accept the truth that so many of us, in this instance the likes of Cindy S., so passionatly struggle to get them to understand. Whether it is for one’s country, one’s society, neighbors, or even one’s personal relationships, you can only give so much before you have nothing left to give, because the gift was not returned in a way that is fulfilling, rejuvenating and sustaining. And if it is not able or willing to truly receive what you giving, (or if it is not the right thing at the right time), then there comes a time you have to just let it go the way it’s going to go, and make sure that you do not let yourself become another casualty of the very problem that you are trying to confront.

Maddi’s closing sentiments are especially resonant, as to finding new ways, asking who will experiment and who will step up to help lead with new ideas and new visions. That is encouraging during these very troubled times of great stress, tumult and transition for so many in so many ways. It is in the air, and Cindy Sheehan is just one example of our need to reach the end of tolerating old ways, and relying on old processes that no longer work, and are even designed not to work and will fail to get us where we say we want to truly go as a society and as individuals. And the very first, and most important factor in all of that and in beginning to break through this current era, is through honesty and truth. If there is anything our nation, our politics, our very selves need it is authenticity. If we truly hold anything dear, there is no greater gift one can give it and no greater way one can serve it than by giving it your honesty and truth. That is the highest form of love anyone can express, one that rises above all fear in its path, and is something we all could be well served to be striving to achieve. It is a big part of that plate to step up to that Maddi refers to here.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

George Carlin turns off the snooze button on those slumbering in the American dream, delivering one of the most direct and devestatingly accurate criticisms of the current state of affairs in America today. It especially deconstructs why public education systems are so lacking and what the true meaning of Bush’s “Ownership Society” really entails. No beating around the bush here. Highly recommended.

Warning: This short video contains language which may not be suitable or acceptable to all members of our audience.

Watch The Video

Bill Moyers lays it on the line here, and does a decent job in providing a cursory summation of the course of American history over the past few decades. His rhetorical analysis here is a powerful indictment as to why our nation has been led to the brink of this sorry state. Some of the most direct and provocative portions of this are where Moyers rips into the hijacking of Jesus by the servants of privilege for a philosophy of greed.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “We, the People” is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

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When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I’m not quoting from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or Mao’s Little Red Book. I’m quoting Time Magazine. From the heart of America’s media establishment comes the judgment that America now has “government for the few at the expense of the many.”

We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that “funds generated by business… must rush by the multimillions” to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: “Some people will obviously have to do with less… .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.” The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call “the animal spirits of business.”

Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

Amen.

Read The Full Speech Transcript

Wow. Bullseye from Tom Englehardt of TomDispatch

Just a few highlights from this insightful piece….

Oddly enough, as far as I can see, the only disqualification for being a pundit or expert in our TV world, when it comes to the President’s Afghan and Iraq wars (or his prospective Iranian one), is having been right in the first place, having imagined from the start something of what actually did occur — as, for instance, was the case with Nation columnist Jonathan Schell and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll , or, for that matter, any of the millions of protestors who took to the streets in early 2003.

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The young in revolt in the 1960s, whether on campuses or in the military, even those who claimed they were out to change the “system” or bring down “the establishment,” had grown up with a deeply embedded belief that this was a system that could be challenged, could be changed; that real democracy (or “participatory democracy” in the phrase of the moment) was actually possible; that each person could make a difference. We still retained — whether we knew it or not — a kind of faith in the American system and its ability to respond. We had hope….

Today, it crosses no young minds that the top officials in the White House might be listening. Many fewer young people, I suspect, have any remnant of that deep faith that our political system could be responsive to them or that anything they could do might change it. When they look to Washington, what they see is fraud, dysfunction, conspiracy, cronyism, cabal, influence-peddling, corruption, fear — in short, a system, a world, beyond response, possibly beyond repair, and utterly alien to their lives. In such a situation, despair or apathy tends to replace anger and hope.

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Our world has changed radically since the Vietnam era. Today, an increasing part of what matters in public life (and work life) has been “privatized” and subcontracted out, or simply outsourced. The U.S. military has essentially been subcontracted out to small-town and immigrant or green-card America — to, that is, the forgotten or ignored places in our land; as a result, for most people in draft-less America, the war is not part of our lives or that of our children. (The draft itself has been carefully kept off the table by the Bush administration, despite the desperation of a body-hungry, overstretched military.) In addition, war-fighting has been outsourced to private corporate contractors who deliver the mail and the fuel, do KP, wash the laundry, build the bases, and, in the case of tens of thousands of rent-a-cop mercenaries , do some of the guarding, fighting, and interrogating in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And yes, the political system has increasingly been subcontracted out, with malice aforethought, to thieves, looters, cronies, and absolute dopes. Little wonder that Americans, living through the Age of Enron, scanning the horizon from Iraq to New Orleans to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and watching Halliburton head for Dubai, generally believe their system no longer works; that those high-school civics texts are a raging joke (that, in fact, fierce joking, à la Jon Stewart, is the only reasonable response to the extreme, roiling absurdity of this administration as well as our world); and that, if you took to the streets of the capital, no one in either party would be paying the slightest attention.

Read The Full Article

Disturbingly accurate description of the theatrical production by journalist Lawrence Wright.

Wright co-wrote a 1998 film, “The Siege,” which, with startling prescience, foresaw terrorist attacks in the United States and subsequent waves of anti-Muslim prejudice, detention, surveillance and allegations of torture. “In the month after 9/11,” he notes, “it was the most rented movie in America, making me the first profiteer in the War on Terror.”

Guilt and curiosity sent him east, resulting in a superb book on the history of al-Qaeda, “The Looming Tower,” and now this play, which will run in New York City until mid-April.

Wright speaks of the roots of radical Islamic fundamentalism, its feudal anti-intellectualism, mistreatment of women, the profound feelings of humiliation and impotent rage (especially against the Saudi royal family) that lead to global violence and death. “Perhaps al-Qaeda can best be understood as an engine that runs on the despair of the Arab world,” he says, “especially its young men, whose lives are so futile and unexpressed. Al-Qaeda offers them a chance to make history. All they have to do is die.”

The plan, according to Wright, is to “draw America deep into conflict with the Muslim world, until we are so overextended and financially exhausted we pull out entirely from the Middle East…. Then, by the year 2020, they will form an Islamic army that will engage in a final apocalyptic war with the unbelievers.” But, Wright continues, they have no plan to govern, no solutions for joblessness or health care or protecting the environment. “Al-Qaeda doesn’t believe in politics. Because it doesn’t believe in the future. It has no vision. It’s not a movement, it’s an instinct, a reaction, like a snakebite.”

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In “My Trip to al-Qaeda,” Lawrence Wright concludes, “There is a hole inside us. It is a black hole. The country we were is being sucked into it. Al-Qaeda cannot destroy America. Only we can do that to ourselves.”

Read the rest of this article by Michael Winship Here

Al-Queda, twin to the Christianist Dominionists of our own culture (led by the likes of James Dobson and Pat Robertson). Two dark mirrors of nihilism, staring into each other’s apocalyptic abyss, promising everything but delivering nothing. Nothing but death. In true Orwellian fashion, they label themselves “pro-life” but are in essence nothing but death cults.

For more on this phenomenon in our own culture, I would recommend Chris Hedges’ work “American Fascists”.

Transcript of the Chris Hedges interview on Democracy Now

It is all about the ability to control. A ruling elite’s wet dream, all under the auspices of waging perpetual war.

A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the enormous defense budget bill at the Bush administration’s behest that makes it easier for a president to override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law.

The provision, signed into law in October, weakens two obscure but important bulwarks of liberty. One is the doctrine that bars military forces, including a federalized National Guard, from engaging in law enforcement. Called posse comitatus, it was enshrined in law after the Civil War to preserve the line between civil government and the military. The other is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which provides the major exemptions to posse comitatus. It essentially limits a president’s use of the military in law enforcement to putting down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion, where a state is violating federal law or depriving people of constitutional rights.

The newly enacted provisions upset this careful balance. They shift the focus from making sure that federal laws are enforced to restoring public order. Beyond cases of actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or to any “other condition.”

Changes of this magnitude should be made only after a thorough public airing. But these new presidential powers were slipped into the law without hearings or public debate. The president made no mention of the changes when he signed the measure, and neither the White House nor Congress consulted in advance with the nation’s governors.

There is a bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, and backed unanimously by the nation’s governors, that would repeal the stealthy revisions. Congress should pass it. If changes of this kind are proposed in the future, they must get a full and open debate.

Read The Original Post from The New York Times

More on this from Joe Conason with his new book “It Can Happen Here”

This is quite interesting in its implications, as well as reiterating the underlining perspective that America can no longer work by and for the people in its current organizational make up. It even touches on how the role of the modern consolidated media system plays into this situation. Here are a few choice segments from this analysis, an analysis all-too-rare in our national major media…

Something interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation, not even the United States, can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.

Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”

Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California’s governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

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Scale also determines who has privileged access to the country’s news media and who can shape its political discourse. In very large nations, television and other forms of political communication are extremely costly. President Bush alone spent $345 million in his 2004 election campaign. This gives added leverage to elites, who have better corporate connections and greater resources than non-elites. The priorities of those elites often differ from state and regional priorities.

James Madison, the architect of the United States Constitution, understood these problems all too well. Madison is usually viewed as favoring constructing the nation on a large scale. What he urged, in fact, was that a nation of reasonable size had advantages over a very small one. But writing to Jefferson at a time when the population of the United States was a mere four million, Madison expressed concern that if the nation grew too big, elites at the center would divide and conquer a widely dispersed population, producing “tyranny.”

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If the scale of a country renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization of power. More than half of the world’s 200 nations formed as breakaways after 1946. These days, many nations, including Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Italy and Spain, just to name a few, are devolving power to regions in various ways.

Decades before President Bush decided to teach Iraq a lesson, George F. Kennan worried that what he called our “monster country” would, through the “hubris of inordinate size,” inevitably become a menace, intervening all too often in other nations’ affairs: „There is a real question as to whether “bigness‚ in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.”

Kennan proposed that devolution, “while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government,” might yield a “dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”

Read The Full Article

Right on, Howard…

The Declaration of Independence, revered as a document but ignored as a guide to action, needs to be read from pulpits and podiums, on street corners and community radio stations throughout the nation. Its words, forgotten for over two centuries, need to become a call to action for the first time since it was read aloud to crowds in the early excited days of the American Revolution: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute new government.”

Damn straight. Long live the American Revolution.

Read The Full Essay

It has reached this point now, even amongst ‘officialdom.’ There is no longer the pretense of acknowledging people as ‘citizen’, but we now are publicly relegated to the role of simply ‘consumer.’

This is from Kevin Martin’s FCC in response to comments I provided to the FCC regarding their approval of the merger of AT&T with BellSouth. Of course, this came to me long after they had already approved it (which pretty much was a done deal anyway, considering Mr. Martin’s role in the Corporate State).

AT&T Merger language

Dear Consumer,

Thank you for contacting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about the AT&T-Bell South Merger. Your comments will be filed in the proper FCC proceeding docket.

On December 29, 2006, the FCC approved the AT&T-Bell South merger. For further information, please see the Press Release discussing the approval of the merger on the Commissions website at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-269275A1.pdf

Again, thank you for contacting us about this important issue. Your views and comments are important to us.

The Federal Communications Commission

Happy shopping, everyone, in the marketplace of ‘democracy’!