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’!

Very interesting and insightful, if disturbing, analysis of the likely forthcoming collapse of the American economic and political system. This Russian does a point by point comparison of the previous collapse of the Soviet system with the impending one of the American corporate/capitalist one, why they happened and what the effects have and will be on their respective societies.

Many of the problems that sunk the Soviet Union are now endangering the United States as well. Such as a huge, well-equipped, very expensive military, with no clear mission, bogged down in fighting Muslim insurgents. Such as energy shortfalls linked to peaking oil production. Such as a persistently unfavorable trade balance, resulting in runaway foreign debt. Add to that a delusional self-image, an inflexible ideology, and an unresponsive political system.

Read Orlov’s complete analysis Here. It is certainly worth the time.

Americans might be enjoying a warm glowing vision of themselves while gazing endlessly in the mirror nationalistic self-reflection, but the rest of the world is increasingly seeing a different image of us. This essay from another foreign press source touches on some disturbing realities we have been trying to bring to the awareness of our fellow citizenry.

We ignore this reality at our own peril.

The financial position of the United States has declined dramatically in the last 15 years. The US federal budget is in the deep red, adding to America’s dependency on debt.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is wiping out loads of dollars from US treasury. A government functioning so irresponsible with no sense of the prosperity of its own country and people is not really a superpower in any sense.

Almost no one is saving any money in the United States today. Saving rates are very low or negative. The US debt grows by about $1.5 billion every weekday and has now reached about $6.5 trillion dollars. Private household debt has reached $11 trillion and 50 per cent of these debts have been incurred since 1998. The Americans are enjoying the present spending spree at the cost of their own future and future generations. The fact is that the expanding consumer debt drives the US economy.

In the near future, many US citizens may have to face harsh reality like a poverty-stricken, third world family, living from hand to mouth situation without any kind of financial reserves whatsoever. The imminent economic crisis is waiting to happen in the US and will be the most thoroughly predicted one in recent human history. People spending so irresponsible with no sense of the prosperity of the country is not a superpower.

Half the world is very impressed by the low levels of unemployment in the United States. Only the other half clearly knows very well that these statistics may be the result of a voluntary telephone survey. Is working just ten hours per week enough for one to be classified as “employed”? The US statistics is usually intended to create more positive image and opinion than about its actual condition. The net reality is that the US job growth rate is falling behind its own population growth.

A country that cannot create jobs for its own population is not a superpower.

Today, the United State’s biggest bankers are China and Japan, both of whom could cause the United States very serious financial problems, if they wish to do so at any time. Roughly 27 per cent of the government bonds issued by the US treasury are held by China and Japan. That’s why US doesn’t complain much about China and Japan.

A country whose financial affairs are in the hands of foreigners is not a superpower.

Read The Full Article Here

If there was ever evidence that America as a nation has failed, this is it.

There is a famous “Twilight Zone” episode about a little boy in a small town who has fantastical powers. Through the misuse of his powers, the little boy has ruined the lives of everybody in the town — for instance, teleporting them into a cornfield, or summoning a snowstorm that destroys their crops. Because anyone who thinks an unhappy thought will be banished, the adults around him can do nothing but cheerfully praise his decisions while they try to nudge him in a less destructive direction.

This episode kept popping into my head when I was reading about President Bush and the Baker-Hamilton commission. Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child.

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…The commission generously avoided revisiting the whole question of who got us into this fiasco and how. As the Washington Post put it, “The panel appeared to steer away from language that might inflame the Bush administration.” Of course, “inflame” is a word typically associated with street mobs or other irrational actors. The fact that the president can be “inflamed” is no longer considered surprising enough to merit comment.

Indeed, everybody seems to understand that if you want to help amend the disaster in Iraq, the No. 1 rule is that you can’t acknowledge it’s a disaster in Bush’s presence. Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the court stenographer of the Bush administration, recently reported that this was a key factor in the hiring of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

This is the kind of nonsense one would read about in history books about decaying empires and corrupted societies. The undeserving leadership of heredity leading a nation to ruin while the courtiers look on and the sycophants grab whatever the spoils around them for themselves, oblivious of the fatal damage being inflicted. Works the same everywhere, whether Bourbon France, Czarist Russia, Hitler and his bunker entourage (led by Martin Boorman), or even Elvis Presley and his ‘Memphis Mafia.’

The fact that we as a society are tolerating this is proof that America is pretty much done, stick a fork in it.

Read The Full Article from the Los Angeles Times

Dave Lindorff delivers one of the better analysis of the current political crisis our nation, lo humanity itself, is currently facing.

Are current political systems - our own and others around the world - fundamentally incapable of dealing with the biggest crisis facing mankind, indeed facing life on earth?

Unfortunately, the answer is pretty much - yes.

It might seem strange that in a democracy, ordinary people would prefer to go about their lives in a way that threatens the very survival of their children, or certainly of their grandchildren, rather than to seriously inconvenience themselves in an effort to protect their progeny, but that is what we see happening.

Perhaps the fact that we are not living in a democracy but rather a corporate state might help explain why this is indeed occurring.

Moreover, political systems, including our own, are structured so as to dissuade anyone in politics from advocating the needed revolutionary changes.

Bingo.

As for those needed changes, I highly recommend the work of CELDF and their Democracy Schools. Attend one if you get the chance. You’ll find it one of the more valuable experiences in your civic life that you will ever have.

Read Dave Lindoff’s Full Essay Here