* * *
Revelation upon revelation of the White House’s shocking acts, cascading like a waterfall, has not precipitated impeachment, calls for their immediate resignations, or their prosecution as war criminals. Bush and Cheney remain in office unscathed, like Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked, horror movie murderer who lives on, movie after movie.
While the crimes of U.S. imperialism are legion, what was done largely behind the scenes in the past is now increasingly being carried out as official policy: no longer de facto but now de jure, no longer retail but wholesale.
What accounts for this momentous shift?
1968 and 2008
We need to go back a bit in time to trace the historical antecedents to the 2008 configuration of political forces. In doing so, it not only makes poetic sense to compare 1968 to 2008, it also makes historical sense.
One way to state this simply is that what makes 1968 different from 2008 is the absence in 2008 of a socialist camp that helped to inspire and sustain the high tide of insurgent movements, metaphorical prairie fires raging and spreading from China (the Cultural Revolution) and Vietnam to Africa, South America, Europe (e.g., May 1968 in Paris), and in the U.S. (the civil rights, anti-war, women’s liberation, et al movements) that characterized the 1960s.
Lyndon Johnson’s nemesis in the Vietnam War and anti-war protests/movement, Nixon’s Watergate scandal and eventual resignation, the ensuing 1978 FISA law that was instituted to prevent future abuses from presidents wanting to spy on citizens, the consent decrees with police department “red squads” and restrictions on the executive branch, COINTELPRO and the like activities, Roe v. Wade and the abolition of the death penalty, all of these and more can be traced back to the post-World War II configuration of forces in the world in which a powerful socialist camp existed, an alternative to the capitalist/imperialist world.
There isn’t room here to lay this out in its fullest, but Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was made possible by the fact that the U.S. government could not contend for the allegiance of the non-aligned nations (the largely “brown, black and yellow” Third World) against the socialist world if it was seen internationally as segregating blacks in its own land.
This recognition led the federal government to file an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953 explicitly stating that the U.S. could not afford to have segregation on this level given the international rivalry with the socialist world, paving the way for Brown v. Board. Brown in turn helped to lift the lid on the long-suffering masses of black people in this country who exploded in a movement that shook the world.
With the ebbing of these 1960s’ insurgencies and the collapse of the socialist camp in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. imperialism no longer had any real rivals – no nations with a competing system, no other superpowers, no vibrant social movements or vital labor unions. The U.S. empire could now expand into the formerly socialist and quasi-socialist world for markets, labor and resources, and dictate terms as it saw fit.
The rise of the neoconservatives - and the neoliberalists of whom the neocons are one specific expression of – would not have been possible without these larger changes to the world’s political economy. The neocons’ vision, exemplified in the Bush regime and first articulated by the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s, of taking full advantage of this period of American hegemony to prevent the emergence of any possible rivals internationally or domestically by launching pre-emptive wars, using elections theft, whipping up a Christian fascist social base, justifying an unrestricted executive (“unitary executive”), employing routine torture, overriding the rule of law explicitly, and deploying the global war on terror as its rationale and 9/11 as its rallying cry, must be understood in this context.
The Democrats and the corporate (non-right wing) media, for their part, are constantly playing catch up and “me too” with some rhetorical reservations and complaints, and some differences with respect to the need for multi-lateral maneuvers prior to unilateral (if necessary) actions, should be seen in this overall context as well. The differences might be summarized between the GOP and the Democrats in foreign policy this way – GOP: “No talking. Bombing starts now!” Democrats: “First we talk, then we bomb.”
The reason why the rest of the political leadership class outside of the GOP has been unwilling to stop the Bush regime is because they share with the GOP a fundamental agreement about the rightness and necessity of a U.S. Empire. Given the extreme disparity of this empire vis a vis the rest of the world and even within the U.S. itself between the plutocracy and the rest of us, the use of increasingly heavy helpings of force and violence to repress people, combined with even more extensive deception, is necessary, no matter which major political party is in power.
As I wrote in early 2006 in Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney:
"We have been witnesses to momentous public policy changes over the last thirty years: the systematic dismantling of the New Deal/welfare state and its replacement by the security or neoliberal state. The neoliberal state (which takes its name from liberal in the sense of laissez-faire capitalism a la 18th C. economist Adam Smith) features deregulation, deindustrialization, re-engineering, privatization, downsizing, globalization, and in our case, an American imperialist empire. It means that social safety net programs are being slashed right and left while the state’s coercive apparatus—the military, the criminal justice system, security and surveillance activities and agencies—are being vastly expanded. When the GOP speaks of curbing government (or as tax activist Grover Norquist has famously stated, shrinking the government so much that it can be drowned in a bathtub) they mean curbing the social safety net. They don’t mean shrinking military or police or spy functions.
"The key figures in this new economic and political order are transnational corporations that dwarf most of the world’s national economies. As of 2000, of the 100 largest economic entities in the world, 51 of them were transnational corporations. Wal-Mart was larger than 182 countries. The 200 largest corporations’ combined sales were larger than all of the world’s countries’ economies less the top 10 countries in economic size! Moreover, this concentration of wealth and power is accelerating. The dominance of these giant conglomerates and their allies in government means that we can expect ever-rising levels of job and social insecurity since this is the fundamental logic driving globalization. The Democrats are not going to stand up to these transnationals; they have not, nor are they capable of it. Hoping and praying that electing Democrats in 2006 will somehow turn this around is a losing strategy. The main problem isn’t that the Democrats are spineless or that they can’t get their act together. The main problem is that both major parties are the political representatives of big capital and of globalization.
"It’s important to further recognize that this isn’t just because the Democrats are beholden to big campaign contributors, resolvable through campaign reform legislation, although that is obviously part of the picture. The essence of the problem is that this situation is precisely what we should expect. When you’re talking about economies on a world scale in which the major players are monstrously large and the stakes involved are gigantic, there is no reason to expect that the people who run in these kind of circles, whether they are CEOs or public officials, are going to truly subject their fantastic power and wealth to the whims of an electorate in which everyone rich and poor alike has one vote. Would you, if you had their level of power and wealth and their ideology? If you had more power than 182 countries and you were one corporation, would you let the electorate decide they were going to, for example, nationalize you? Would you put the fate of your extremely concentrated power and wealth in the hands of 'the people'
"Both major parties in this country are in agreement that this new economic order of globalization, this security state, is the right thing. They differ somewhat over some particular policies, with some sectors, for example, more based in science and more concerned about the environment (e.g., Gore), but they don’t differ on the fundamentals. The media are themselves fully embedded within this new economic order; they are themselves major corporations. The Democrats aren’t the leading political representatives of this new order because in their highest and best expression, the Democrats are FDR New Dealers, and the material basis for that stance has been getting wiped out systematically over the last thirty years. That is why the Democrats appear to be so hapless and so feeble against the GOP’s cutthroat viciousness, for the GOP represents the most aggressive, most in your face cutting edge of the ascendant neoliberal state."
Revelation upon revelation of the White House’s shocking acts, cascading like a waterfall, has not precipitated impeachment, calls for their immediate resignations, or their prosecution as war criminals. Bush and Cheney remain in office unscathed, like Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked, horror movie murderer who lives on, movie after movie.
While the crimes of U.S. imperialism are legion, what was done largely behind the scenes in the past is now increasingly being carried out as official policy: no longer de facto but now de jure, no longer retail but wholesale.
What accounts for this momentous shift?
We need to go back a bit in time to trace the historical antecedents to the 2008 configuration of political forces. In doing so, it not only makes poetic sense to compare 1968 to 2008, it also makes historical sense.
One way to state this simply is that what makes 1968 different from 2008 is the absence in 2008 of a socialist camp that helped to inspire and sustain the high tide of insurgent movements, metaphorical prairie fires raging and spreading from China (the Cultural Revolution) and Vietnam to Africa, South America, Europe (e.g., May 1968 in Paris), and in the U.S. (the civil rights, anti-war, women’s liberation, et al movements) that characterized the 1960s.
Lyndon Johnson’s nemesis in the Vietnam War and anti-war protests/movement, Nixon’s Watergate scandal and eventual resignation, the ensuing 1978 FISA law that was instituted to prevent future abuses from presidents wanting to spy on citizens, the consent decrees with police department “red squads” and restrictions on the executive branch, COINTELPRO and the like activities, Roe v. Wade and the abolition of the death penalty, all of these and more can be traced back to the post-World War II configuration of forces in the world in which a powerful socialist camp existed, an alternative to the capitalist/imperialist world.
There isn’t room here to lay this out in its fullest, but Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was made possible by the fact that the U.S. government could not contend for the allegiance of the non-aligned nations (the largely “brown, black and yellow” Third World) against the socialist world if it was seen internationally as segregating blacks in its own land.
This recognition led the federal government to file an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953 explicitly stating that the U.S. could not afford to have segregation on this level given the international rivalry with the socialist world, paving the way for Brown v. Board. Brown in turn helped to lift the lid on the long-suffering masses of black people in this country who exploded in a movement that shook the world.
With the ebbing of these 1960s’ insurgencies and the collapse of the socialist camp in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. imperialism no longer had any real rivals – no nations with a competing system, no other superpowers, no vibrant social movements or vital labor unions. The U.S. empire could now expand into the formerly socialist and quasi-socialist world for markets, labor and resources, and dictate terms as it saw fit.
The rise of the neoconservatives - and the neoliberalists of whom the neocons are one specific expression of – would not have been possible without these larger changes to the world’s political economy. The neocons’ vision, exemplified in the Bush regime and first articulated by the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s, of taking full advantage of this period of American hegemony to prevent the emergence of any possible rivals internationally or domestically by launching pre-emptive wars, using elections theft, whipping up a Christian fascist social base, justifying an unrestricted executive (“unitary executive”), employing routine torture, overriding the rule of law explicitly, and deploying the global war on terror as its rationale and 9/11 as its rallying cry, must be understood in this context.
The Democrats and the corporate (non-right wing) media, for their part, are constantly playing catch up and “me too” with some rhetorical reservations and complaints, and some differences with respect to the need for multi-lateral maneuvers prior to unilateral (if necessary) actions, should be seen in this overall context as well. The differences might be summarized between the GOP and the Democrats in foreign policy this way – GOP: “No talking. Bombing starts now!” Democrats: “First we talk, then we bomb.”
The reason why the rest of the political leadership class outside of the GOP has been unwilling to stop the Bush regime is because they share with the GOP a fundamental agreement about the rightness and necessity of a U.S. Empire. Given the extreme disparity of this empire vis a vis the rest of the world and even within the U.S. itself between the plutocracy and the rest of us, the use of increasingly heavy helpings of force and violence to repress people, combined with even more extensive deception, is necessary, no matter which major political party is in power.
As I wrote in early 2006 in Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney:
"We have been witnesses to momentous public policy changes over the last thirty years: the systematic dismantling of the New Deal/welfare state and its replacement by the security or neoliberal state. The neoliberal state (which takes its name from liberal in the sense of laissez-faire capitalism a la 18th C. economist Adam Smith) features deregulation, deindustrialization, re-engineering, privatization, downsizing, globalization, and in our case, an American imperialist empire. It means that social safety net programs are being slashed right and left while the state’s coercive apparatus—the military, the criminal justice system, security and surveillance activities and agencies—are being vastly expanded. When the GOP speaks of curbing government (or as tax activist Grover Norquist has famously stated, shrinking the government so much that it can be drowned in a bathtub) they mean curbing the social safety net. They don’t mean shrinking military or police or spy functions.
"The key figures in this new economic and political order are transnational corporations that dwarf most of the world’s national economies. As of 2000, of the 100 largest economic entities in the world, 51 of them were transnational corporations. Wal-Mart was larger than 182 countries. The 200 largest corporations’ combined sales were larger than all of the world’s countries’ economies less the top 10 countries in economic size! Moreover, this concentration of wealth and power is accelerating. The dominance of these giant conglomerates and their allies in government means that we can expect ever-rising levels of job and social insecurity since this is the fundamental logic driving globalization. The Democrats are not going to stand up to these transnationals; they have not, nor are they capable of it. Hoping and praying that electing Democrats in 2006 will somehow turn this around is a losing strategy. The main problem isn’t that the Democrats are spineless or that they can’t get their act together. The main problem is that both major parties are the political representatives of big capital and of globalization.
"It’s important to further recognize that this isn’t just because the Democrats are beholden to big campaign contributors, resolvable through campaign reform legislation, although that is obviously part of the picture. The essence of the problem is that this situation is precisely what we should expect. When you’re talking about economies on a world scale in which the major players are monstrously large and the stakes involved are gigantic, there is no reason to expect that the people who run in these kind of circles, whether they are CEOs or public officials, are going to truly subject their fantastic power and wealth to the whims of an electorate in which everyone rich and poor alike has one vote. Would you, if you had their level of power and wealth and their ideology? If you had more power than 182 countries and you were one corporation, would you let the electorate decide they were going to, for example, nationalize you? Would you put the fate of your extremely concentrated power and wealth in the hands of 'the people'
"Both major parties in this country are in agreement that this new economic order of globalization, this security state, is the right thing. They differ somewhat over some particular policies, with some sectors, for example, more based in science and more concerned about the environment (e.g., Gore), but they don’t differ on the fundamentals. The media are themselves fully embedded within this new economic order; they are themselves major corporations. The Democrats aren’t the leading political representatives of this new order because in their highest and best expression, the Democrats are FDR New Dealers, and the material basis for that stance has been getting wiped out systematically over the last thirty years. That is why the Democrats appear to be so hapless and so feeble against the GOP’s cutthroat viciousness, for the GOP represents the most aggressive, most in your face cutting edge of the ascendant neoliberal state."
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