[NYTr] Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Sep 3, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd09032007.html


Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph

By CHRIS FLOYD

    Put your hand on my head, baby;
    Do I have a temperature?
    I see people who ought to know better
    Standing around like furniture.
    There's a wall between you
    And what you want -- you got to leap it.
    Tonight you got the power to take it;
    Tomorrow you won't have the power to keep it.

                -Bob Dylan


  I.

Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the
patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't
that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some
metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in
the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal
frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of
the landscape and the way that people live.

The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to
take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's
not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and
ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003
aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped
again by its "rescuers" after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused,
diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.

The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for
the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the
long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the
Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of
victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the
losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the
Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then
came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations,
even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite
all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight
months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their
violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

The war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or
wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet --
more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives
swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more
instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently
illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been
codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand
the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and
a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and
executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize
American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them
indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the
legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and
even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to
enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from
Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen --
and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain
for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign
right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He
retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques
are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration
camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those
"strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly
brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by
the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced
the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full
circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now
praising the "military success" of the Iraq escalation -- despite the
evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including
troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political
cohesion and regional stability. This emerging "bipartisan consensus"
on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy
concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the
September "progress report" will be greeted as a justification for
continuing the "surge" in one form or another.

It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest
political feats ever. Despite Bush's standing as one of the most
despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control
of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his
policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal
and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation's infrastructure and
the callous abandonment of one of the nation's major cities to natural
disaster and crony greed -- despite all of this, and much more that
would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a
democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger
position than it was a year ago.

How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a
democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.

It is well-nigh impossible to imagine a force in American public life
today rising up to thwart the Administration's will on any element of
its militarist and corporatist agenda, including the arbitrary launch
of an attack on Iran. What's more, even if some institution had the
will -- and made the effort -- to balk Bush, it wouldn't matter. As the
New York Times noted a couple of weeks ago:

"... Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in
their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do
whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action
Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range
of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice
Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering
to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the
possibility that the president could once again use what they have said
in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the
regulations set by Congress.

"At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan
administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed
Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the
administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by
Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant
attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to
three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and
others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the
new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, 'is just
advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have
not changed their position that the president's Article II powers trump
any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign
intelligence.'"

Thus the Administration's own spokesmen are now saying openly, in plain
English, what they once only insinuated beneath layers of legal jargon:
that the president of the United States does not have to obey the law
of the land. He does not have to obey acts passed by Congress. He is
free to act arbitrarily, to do anything whatsoever that he claims is
necessary to "defend national security," in his capacity as
Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There is literally nothing
anyone can do--not Congress, not the courts--to stop him.

That is Bush's claim -- and it has been accepted. The American
Establishment has surrendered to an authoritarian takeover of the
American state. If this was not the case, then Bush and Cheney would
have been impeached long ago (or least months ago) for their treason
against the Constitution, their coup d'etat against the Republic. At
the very least, they would have been mocked, scorned, censured and
shunned for their ludicrous and dangerous pretensions to royal power.
All manner of institutional, legal and political fetters would have
been put upon them, as happened in the last days of Richard Nixon's
presidency.

Instead, Bush's power has only grown with each new outrageous claim of
unchallengeable presidential authority. It is too little understood how
vital -- and how fatal -- Congress' acquiescence in all of this has
been. By continuing to treat the Bush Administration as a legitimate
government, to carry on with business as usual instead of initiating
impeachments or refusing to cooperate with a gang of usurpers, Congress
instead confirms the New Order day after day. Some Democrats may
grumble, whine or bluster -- but they DO nothing, and their very
participation in the sinister farce ensures its continuance.

Again, look at the facts, the reality: Bush wants Congressional
approval of his illegal surveillance; he gets it. Bush wants to launch
spy satellites against the American people; he does it. Bush wants
concentration camps and secret prisons with torture; he's got them.
Bush wants to escalate a ruinous, murderous, unpopular war; he does it.
He wants to declare people "enemy combatants" and imprison them
indefinitely; he does it. Bush's spokesmen openly claim that the laws
passed by the people's representatives are "just advisory" and "the
president can still do whatever he wants to do," and there is no
outcry, no action, no defense of the Republic against this overthrow of
the Constitution.

Who could look at this reality and declare that the United States is
still a republic, in any genuine form? Who could see this and deny that
the nation is now an authoritarian state under an "elected" dictator?

Those who insist on seeing the current situation as "politics as
usual" (even if an extreme version of it) will point to peripheral
elements that still retain some of the flavor of the old order: such as
the Justice Department scandal, with its forced resignations and
Congressional probes, or the occasional criminal trial of Bush Regime
minions like Scooter Libby. Some will say such things are proof that we
don't really live under tyranny, that deep down, the "system works."

But all of this is indeed "politics as usual" -- the kind of politics
that occurs under every system of rule. Even the Caesars were subject
to such pressures, forced to remove (and sometimes execute) officials
who had become too controversial due to scandal, crime, corruption or
factional opposition, or even unpopularity with "the rabble." Sometimes
the Caesars themselves were removed for such causes -- but the
tyrannical system went on. Likewise, the kings and queens of England in
their autocratic heyday were forced to give up ministers -- even court
favorites -- due to similar pressures. And so too the Russian czars,
the Chinese emperors, the Persian monarchs, the Muslim Caliphs, the
Egyptian pharaohs, etc. Even Hitler was sometimes thwarted or hampered
in his polices by factional strife or public displeasure. "Politics"
does not disappear in undemocratic regimes. It is a function of human
relations, and carries on irregardless 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 invasiveand 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.


[Chris Floyd is an American journalist and frequent contributor to
CounterPunch. He is the author of the book "Empire Burlesque: High
Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium." He can be reached through
his webistie: http://www.chris-floyd.com ]