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Post-Mortem America: Bush's
Year of Triumph and the Hard Way Ahead
Chris
Floyd
Monday Sept 3, 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.
(Article continues below)
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.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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