One of the people on Democracy now, when asked to describe what is happening at
our southern border, said it's "a humanitarian catastrophe". Well yes, but it's
more than that because it is being purposefully caused by the actions of our
government. It's a fascist, racist attack on people who came here for shelter
and help.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2018 11:03 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: America the Failed State
Reality Host Donald Trump is in his glory. As he tweets and twitters and makes
a mockery out of the Presidency, his little band of stoolies are busily rubbing
democracy from the American Way of Life.
The amazing thing is not how quickly the social services and public safeguards
are being dismantled, but it's the fact that we made any gains in the face of
an Oligarchy that refuses to accept the Working Class as true Citizens. One
day the American Working Class will realize that to the Ruling Class, we are no
different in their eyes than the Dairy herd. Instead of milk, we Workers
produce all of the
products which allow our Masters to live in Grand Style. And, like
the Dairy Cow, as long as we are of value to our Masters, we receive a measure
of consideration. But if we step out of line or no longer produce, we are
quickly disposed of.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/2/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
America the Failed State
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
TORONTO—Our “corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” as the writer John
Ralston Saul calls it, has opened a Pandora’s box of evils that is
transforming America into a failed state. The “unholy trinity of
corruption, impunity and violence,” he said, can no longer be checked.
The ruling elites abjectly serve corporate power to exploit and
impoverish the citizenry.
Democratic institutions, including the courts, are mechanisms of
corporate repression. Financial fraud and corporate crime are carried
out with impunity. The decay is exacerbated by the state’s
indiscriminate use of violence abroad and at home, where rogue law
enforcement agencies harass and arrest citizens and the undocumented
and often kill the unarmed. A depressed and enraged population,
trapped by chronic unemployment and underemployment, is overdosing on
opioids and beset by rising suicide rates. It engages in acts of
nihilistic violence, including mass shootings. Hate groups
proliferate. The savagery, mayhem and grotesque distortions familiar
to those on the outer reaches of empire increasingly characterize
American existence. And presiding over it all is the American version
of Ubu Roi, playwright Alfred Jarry’s gluttonous, idiotic, vulgar,
narcissistic and infantile king, who turned politics into burlesque.
“Congress works through corruption,” Saul, the author of books such as
“Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” and “The
Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World,” said when we
spoke in Toronto. “I look at Congress and I see the British Parliament
in the late 18th century, the rotten boroughs. Did they have
elections? Yes. Were the elections exciting? Yes. They were extremely
exciting.”
Rotten boroughs were the 19th-century version of gerrymandering. The
British oligarchs created electoral maps through which depopulated
boroughs—50 of them had fewer than 50 voters—were easily dominated by
the rich to maintain control of the House of Commons. In the United
States, our ruling class has done much the same, creating districts
where incumbents, who often run unchallenged, return to Congress
election after election. Only about 40 of the 435 seats in the House
of Representatives are actually contested. And given the composition
of the Supreme Court, especially with Donald Trump poised to install
another justice, it will get worse.
The corruption of the British system was amended in what Saul called
“a wave upwards.” The 1832 Reform Act abolished a practice in which
oligarchs, such as Charles Howard, the 11th Duke of Norfolk,
controlled the election results in 11 boroughs. The opening up of the
British parliamentary system took nearly a century. In the United
States, Saul said, the destruction of democracy is part of “a wave
downwards.”
The two political parties are one party—the corporate party. They do
not debate substantive issues. They each support the expansion of
imperial wars, the bloated military budget, the dictates of global
capitalism, the bailing out of Wall Street, punishing austerity
measures, assaulting basic civil liberties through wholesale
government surveillance and the abolition of due process, and an
electoral process that has cemented into place a system of legalized
bribery. They battle over cultural tropes such as abortion, gay rights
and prayer in schools. We elect politicians based on how we are made
to feel about them by the public relations industry. Politics is
anti-politics.
The Republican Party built its political base in these culture wars
around Christian fascists, nativists and white supremacists. The
Democratic Party built its base around those who supported workers’
rights, multiculturalism, diversity and gender equality. The base of
each party was used and manipulated by elites. The Republican Party
elites had no intention of banning abortion or turning America into a
“Christian nation.” The Democratic Party elites had no intention of
protecting workers from predatory corporatism. Everyone was sold out.
The ascendancy of a populist right, dominated by racists and bigots,
is the inevitable product of the corporate coup d’état, Saul said. He
warned we should not be complacent because of President Trump’s
imbecility. Trump is immensely dangerous. “The insipid,” Thomas Mann
wrote in “The Magic Mountain,” “is not synonymous with the harmless.”
“How could a civilization devoted to structure, expertise and answers
evolve into other than a coalition of professional groups?” Saul asked
in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “How, then, could the individual citizen not
be seen as a serious impediment to getting on with business? This has
been obscured by the proposition of painfully simplified abstract
notions which are divorced from any social reality and presented as
values.”
“The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly
authoritarian in a modern, administrative way,” he wrote in another
section of the book. “The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They
look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will
do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure
men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of
democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which
to punish the modern elites.”
All despotic regimes, Saul said, carry out their final battle for
control by contending against public officials and government
bureaucrats, the so-called deep state, which views the rise to power
of demagogues and their sleazy enablers with alarm. These traditional
courtiers, often cynical, ambitious, amoral and subservient to
corporate power, nevertheless engage in the decorum and language of
democracy. A few with a conscience win minor skirmishes to slow the
rise of tyranny. Despots see these courtiers and democratic
institutions, no matter how anemic, as a threat. This explains the
assaults on the State Department, the Justice Department, the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the
courts.
Despots use their appointees to undermine and destroy these
institutions, mocking their existence and questioning the loyalty of
the professionals who staff them. The reviled and neutered public
employee surrenders or walks away in despair. Last year, the entire
senior level of management officials resigned at the State Department.
Resignations continue to bleed the diplomatic core, as they do at
other agencies and departments, and last week included James D.
Melville Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, and Susan Thornton, the
nominee to be assistant secretary for East Asian affairs.
“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the
United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as
NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to
go,” Melville said in the post that announced his resignation.
Once a process of deconstruction is complete, the system calcifies
into tyranny. There remain no internal mechanisms, even in name, to
carry out reform. This corrosive process is being played out daily in
Trump’s Twitter rages, lies, smears and the barrage of insults he
levels against public servants, including some of his own appointees,
such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as institutions such as the
FBI.
Witnessing this, Saul berates the American press too, which he said
willingly plays its part in the charade for ratings and advertising
dollars.
“Trump gives these astonishingly Mussolini-ish press conferences,” he said.
“He says to the press, ‘Shut up. Stop!’ The press screams at him like
a mob, a bunch of cattle. How can they be taken seriously? It is like
the end of the Roman Republic. Important political leaders from the
Senate, along with their rivals, would move around Rome with 50 people
to protect them.
Scenes,
exactly like Trump’s interactions with the press, defined the end of
the Roman Republic. Nobody knew what was going on. There was no
dignity. You can’t have a democracy without a level of respect and
dignity. You only have chaos. This chaos eventually leads to a call
for autocratic order. Trump benefits from the confusion, even though
he resembles a cartoonish figure out of a funny novel, a character
from Jean Genet’s ‘The Balcony,’ although without the self-awareness.”
Trump’s decision to launch a trade war—Canada will impose punitive
measures on $12.63 billion worth of imported American goods in
response—is an example of the damage a despot who has little
understanding of the economy, politics, international relations or law
can do. These self-inflicted wounds, Saul warned, see despots
intensify attacks on the demonized and the vulnerable, such as Muslims
and the undocumented. Despots frantically scapegoat others for their
mess, often inciting violence among their supporters to placate an
inchoate rage.
“I’ve always opposed trade deals not because I oppose trade,” Saul
said, “or because I thought they were about getting a fair balance in
the trade, but because the trade deals were about something else. They
were about deregulation. They were about handing power to corporations
and banks. They weren’t about trade. Trump has again and again
attacked the Canadian dairy system. Nobody has stopped to ask him,
‘Why are you opposing this instead of adopting it for yourself?’ A lot
of American dairy farmers would like to have the Canadian system.”
“The free market approach to agriculture produces a surplus that
drives prices down and destroys the income of farmers,” Saul said.
“There are two ways of responding to this. One of them is subsidizing.
Europe, following the old social democratic approach, subsidizes their
agricultural sector.
This drives down the income of farmers, so [the governments] subsidize
[agriculture] more. They have enormous surpluses. Periodically,
they’re throwing millions of tomatoes on the streets.”
“The United States claims it embraces the free market, but it does the
same thing as the Europeans,” Saul said. “It too heavily subsidizes
the agricultural industry. This leads to American dairy farmers
producing too much milk. This economic argument says the way to win is
to mass-produce cheap goods. This is the Walmart argument. You’re not
selling your milk or cheese for enough to make a living. The end
result is, even though you subsidize them, the farmers go bankrupt.
They commit suicide. You have terrible unhappiness in the [U.S.] dairy
community.”
“We have a very efficient management system in Canada that keeps the
prices up, not so high that working-class people can’t buy milk and
cheese, but it keeps the prices up high enough that farmers can make a proper
living,”
Saul
said. “Because farmers can make a proper living they’re not committing
suicide. What Trump is saying to Canadians is that they should give up
a system that works so Canadian farmers can commit suicide with
American farmers.”
“The problem with the Western world is surplus production,” Saul said.
“We’re in surplus production in almost every area. But there is a
terrible distribution system where people around the globe suffer and
die from starvation. This is a distribution problem, not a production
problem.”
Saul said the imposition of tariffs and the crude insults Trump uses
against American allies—he called Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau “dishonest and weak”—are rapidly destroying America’s clout
and standing in the global hierarchy. This behavior is having very
negative political, economic and social consequences for the United
States.
“The whole world, the Western world in particular, invested enormously
in the idea that the United States is the leader,” Saul said. “The
idea that the United States is to be admired. What’s sad about it is
Americans take it for granted that the world loves them. They’ve never
analyzed the responsibilities that come with being the leader. It’s
what you expect from a good parent. You act in a certain way. People
want to identify with the United States. It’s been that way since the
Second World War. All this is being thrown away. Like or dislike
Obama, he rebuilt a great part of the world’s admiration for the
United States. I know what his failures were.
But
I also know his strengths. He was a president who was capable of
acting and talking like the intelligent, civilized American that
everyone wants to admire.”
“But there’s always a shadow to the bright tower,” Saul went on.
“Trump’s feeding that shadow. ‘Americans are stupid. Americans are corrupt.
Americans
are not educated. Americans can’t be trusted.’ The whole list. The
longer the chaos goes on, the worse it gets.”
The collapse of the legislative and executive branches of government
has now been accompanied by the collapse of the judiciary. The loss of
an independent judiciary, Saul warned, is especially ominous.
“The biggest problem in the United States is a very powerful and
deeply corrupted Supreme Court,” Saul said. “This will set patterns for
decades.
It
will be hard to undo the evil being put into place.”
Saul despaired, at the same time, over the Trump administration’s
attack on public education, which he called “the most fundamental
service of government when it comes to a democracy.”
“What holds democracy up?” Saul asked. “What makes democracy work?
Public education is number one. A well-educated citizen. [Secretary of
Education] Betsy DeVos is undoing that. There is a special place for her in
hell.”
U.S. trading partners and allies such as Canada and European states
will, he said, reduce their dependence on the American market. The
traditional strategic and political ties to Washington will be
steadily weakened. And when the next financial crash comes, and Saul
expects one to come, the United States will be bereft of partners when
it needs them most.
“If you treat your closest allies as a threat, who is going to stand
with you?” he asked.
Chris Hedges
