USA a failed state? It may be closer than you think

It had to end like this. You don’t allow the amoral rich to run a nation without effective oversight and restraint and expect a just, democratic, and compassionate republic.

There’s only one common factor in the failure of great nations: Mismanagement. The USA is heading down a well traveled road to its own Armageddon. Rome, China, Russia, the British Empire and others have all been there before.
••
By Paul Wallis [print_link]
_____________________
The Caligula-like state of the US as a corporate entity is hardly a secret. Caligula made his horse a god, the US media has made dis-informative demagogues gods. Any factually inaccurate piece of information has a fairly good chance of becoming accepted as gospel truth in this environment.
.
The political environment is utterly incapable of governance without melodrama. The GOP doesn’t listen, and the Democrats apparently don’t learn. The ultra-constipated movement of legislation regularly brings actual government to an actual standstill, it just carries on by inertia until someone condescends to pass an appropriation.
.
Economically the nation’s a disaster area, and the only notable growth in employment is for press release writers who don’t particularly care what they write or why they write it.
.
This could be considered a continuation of the Civil War by other means. This time, however, the enemy is the public. “They the people” have no effective means of fighting back, and the slaves are now bonded to cheapskate salaries which have created a class of Working Poor which never really existed except in the absolute bottom minimum wage jobs before about 1980. The public has been politically neutered.
.
Nothing gets done well. Wars, budgets, policies, whatever, they all stagger along in a dysfunctional daze until some new crisis emerges. This is exactly the same story as many fallen civilizations.
.
The rule the Romans could have taught the US is simple: “Don’t go broke.” Economic chaos was more common than not in the Roman Empire, and the disasters multiplied as the financial tangles and lack of money progressively beggared everything but the military. Ultimately, the military auctioned off the job of Emperor to somebody, decided they didn’t like him, and killed him, before another succession of emperors killed off the Western Roman Empire and an entirely different civilization emerged in the east.
.
The Chinese could have taught the US another basic lesson: “Insularity destroys countries.” The Chinese went from being the most advanced nation on Earth to a primitive, closed society incapable of dealing with Western and Japanese expansion. That wasn’t ancient China, by the way. It was the story of China up to 1911. Nearly a half a century of unrestrained bloodbaths did the rest.
.
The Russians can provide a lesson that “A monomaniacal approach to spending is fatal.” The crash of the Soviet Union was a hideous event inside Russia, resulting in the life expectancy dropping by a few decades for a while. The end result was a totally different nation, much amended geographically and politically.
.
The British Empire has another lesson: “However big you are, ignorance and hidebound policies will wipe you out.” A few wars, a lot of social and economic mismanagement, and where’s the British Empire?
.
Poland could have taught the US a thing about politics: “Politics and sleaze are the same things”. In the 18th century, 100% vote was required to pass legislation. The result was a roaring trade in vote buying, national poverty and the country was absorbed by Prussia and Russia.
.
The US, through a truly insane, self-inflicted mix of these factors, has managed to achieve a condition which would have been unthinkable a generation ago. A complete misconception of itself has helped a lot. The US is a super power, not because of its nukes, but because of its economic clout. That clout has been reduced to a paper fan by the recession, unprecedented loss of real capital, and the shutdown of America’s truly global range secret weapon, credit, now well and truly disarmed by its own operators. Trade, internal and external, is now a twitching mess of signals, with all indicators looking every way but up.
.
The social results are well known. Crime, media pandering to privileged nutcases and politics are now the only real growth industries. The basics of Middle America have been falling to pieces. Home ownership, health, education, welfare, you name it. The state economies are deficit-riddled disaster areas. The Midwest has been gutted. Michigan was in deep recession long before the crash. Jobs which generate domestic capital were long ago exterminated by outsourcing. California has been battling its budget for decades. The South is a “job free zone”, made worse by the recession. The West? What West? There’s a West?
.
And the result so far?
What’s most fascinating about this train wreck is the aura of respectability so many people who’ve contributed to it seem to think they have. Duly elected ignoramuses claiming they know a damn thing about running a hot dog stand. Arguably the most gutless, talentless, and notably very unelected collection of people in history providing a Rent A Mob Rule effect in the media. A collection of naïve, absolutely powerless dupes like the Tea Party somehow deciding they’ve figured out what’s wrong with everything and can fix it with slogans.
.
The Tea Party could rename itself the Tea Towel, because that’s how much actual influence they have. They’re free publicity for political interests, have no power base, no capital, no direct enabling connections and no way of influencing anything that doesn’t want to be influenced. They’re also paying very large amounts of money for the privilege.
.
On the Liberal side, “Hunker Down” has replaced “Yes We Can”. Once again, idealism is supposed to educate, house, tend to the sick and employ people, and create a future out of rhetoric. Wanna bet?
.
The great immovable sewer blockage which is modern Washington is hardly the best tool for actual achievement. Its contribution to date over what feels like centuries of bipolar girlish tantrums is self delusion. Nothing, a round and jolly zero, has been done to de-clog the thing. Legislation is one thing, working methods are another, and facts don’t seem to agree with either of them. Ideology has gone from a revolutionary principle to an excuse. This lesson seems never to be learned.
.
It doesn’t matter how sincere you may be, how talented, or how pragmatic. What matters is what’s achieved. The US needs to get its head out of its backside and start working on real achievements. If liberal progressives want to claim any sort of achievement, that’s where to start. Find the methods, and stop tinkering with a machine which no longer works, or even pretends to work.
.
The definition of a failed state is “Can’t get anything done and things keep getting worse”. How close is that, would you say?


There’s Nothing Wrong with Social Security that Taxing the Rich Fairly Wouldn’t Fix

Dave Lindorff  |  Mon, 08/16/2010 |    [print_link]
Paul Krugman, in his column today, is right to expose the attacks on Social Security as being the work of right-wing ideologues eager to destroy a government program that works, backed by cowardly Democrats who want to show their fiscal “responsibility” by getting tough with future pensioners.
.
But he doesn’t go the extra step to point out that this program, founded 75 years ago as a cornerstone of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, could be much more fair and even generous to elderly and disabled retirees, and also placed on a much sounder economic footing, by a few simple reforms that would not cost most people a penny, or require hard working folks to work one day longer before retiring.
.
.
But there is a simple solution to even this deception, which is to eliminate the cap on income which is subject to the Social Security tax.
.
.
Making things even more unfair, if someone were to earn that $106,800, or any other amount, by investing in the stock market, or by investing in real estate, he or she would pay no SSI tax at all, since the tax is only applied to what is called “earned income,” not to investment income.
.
According to a recent study conducted by the Congressional Budget Office for the Senate Special Committee on Aging, if this income cap for the Social Security tax was eliminated, so that all earned income was taxed, the dreaded wall when current workers’ tax payments ceases to be enough to pay for current retiree benefits, instead of arriving in 2037, would be pushed back to at least 2075, a date almost as distant in the future as today is from the founding of the Social Security program.
.
Of course, if the tax were applied also and at the same rate to unearned income from investment, not only would there be no Social Security crisis ever, but instead of talking about making people work until they are 70, and about cutting benefits for retirees, we could be talking about lowering the retirement age to 62, and raisingbenefits, so that people could live decently in retirement instead of worrying that they might have to cut their food intake in order to pay the rent or buy required medications. People could also stop having to lose sleep at night worrying about the destruction of their IRA or 401(k) by the Wall Street banksters. Alternatively, the retirement age could be restored to the original 65, and the tax rate on all workers could be reduced.
.
.
Krugman is also wrong in saying that it is ideologues who are trying to wreck Social Security. The ideologues at places like the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation are providing the intellectual justification for destroying Social Security, but the real opposition to Social Security, though, is corporate America, as represented by groups like the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce (it’s corporate America that funds those foundations and their resident “scholars,” after all).
.
And the reason for this corporate opposition is that Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes paid by workers are both matched, dollar for dollar, by employers. If you pay 6.2% of your income in taxes to the Social Security Administration each year, so does your boss, and if the income cap is lifted for workers it will also be lifted for employers. That means a bigger tax bill for the company, and of course personally for the managers and board members.
.
So let’s at least be honest in this coming battle over “saving” Social Security. It is nothing less than a war between bosses and workers.
.
.
.
This is not about a private pension fund that’s going bust. It’s about a public pension program that has been raided, that has never been adequate, and that needs to be bolstered now by a tax on the rich. Nothing elaborate mind you. They just need to pay at the same rate that the rest of us do.
.

Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism

Reducing activism to online petitions, this breed of marketeering technocrats damage every political movement they touch
Micah White  |  Thursday 12 August 2010 | [print_link]
.
Digital activists have gone online and adopted the logic of the marketplace.
A battle is raging for the soul of activism. It is a struggle between digital activists, who have adopted the logic of the marketplace, and those organisers who vehemently oppose the marketisation of social change. At stake is the possibility of an emancipatory revolution in our lifetimes. PHOTO: (left) Traditional demonstration. Are they really more effective than online activism?
.
The conflict can be traced back to 1997 when a quirky Berkeley, California-based software company known for its iconic flying toaster screensaver was purchased for $13.8m (£8.8m). The sale financially liberated the founders, a left-leaning husband-and-wife team. He was a computer programmer, she a vice-president of marketing. And a year later they founded an online political organisation known as MoveOn. Novel for its combination of the ideology of marketing with the skills of computer programming, MoveOn is a major centre-leftist pro-Democrat force in the US. It has since been heralded as the model for 21st-century activism.
.
The trouble is that this model of activism uncritically embraces the ideology of marketing. It accepts that the tactics of advertising and market research used to sell toilet paper can also build social movements. This manifests itself in an inordinate faith in the power of metrics to quantify success. Thus, everything digital activists do is meticulously monitored and analysed. The obsession with tracking clicks turns digital activism into clicktivism.
.
.

.
Exchanging the substance of activism for reformist platitudes that do well in market tests, clicktivists damage every genuine political movement they touch. In expanding their tactics into formerly untrammelled political scenes and niche identities, they unfairly compete with legitimate local organisations who represent an authentic voice of their communities. They are the Wal-Mart of activism: leveraging economies of scale, they colonise emergent political identities and silence underfunded radical voices.
.
Digital activists hide behind gloried stories of viral campaigns and inflated figures of how many millions signed their petition in 24 hours. Masters of branding, their beautiful websites paint a dazzling self-portrait. But, it is largely a marketing deception. While these organisations are staffed by well-meaning individuals who sincerely believe they are doing good, a bit of self-criticism is sorely needed from their leaders.
.
The truth is that as the novelty of online activism wears off, millions of formerly socially engaged individuals who trusted digital organisations are coming away believing in the impotence of all forms of activism. Even leading Bay Area clicktivist organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to motivate their members to any action whatsoever. The insider truth is that the vast majority, between 80% to 90%, of so-called members rarely even open campaign emails. Clicktivists are to blame for alienating a generation of would-be activists with their ineffectual campaigns that resemble marketing.
.
.

.
Against the progressive technocracy of clicktivism, a new breed of activists will arise. In place of measurements and focus groups will be a return to the very thing that marketers most fear: the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society. Resuscitating the emancipatory project the left was once known for, these activists will attack the deadening commercialisation of life. And, uniting a global population against the megacorporations who unduly influence our democracies, they will jettison the consumerist ideology of marketing that has for too long constrained the possibility of social revolution.
.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010




Top NASA Scientist Confirms: Climate Change Is Real

ON AUGUST 8, Keith Olbermann

Bradley Manning: An American Hero

Should a citizen be prosecuted for trying to stop an illegal state policy? Where’s the American Zola?

STEPHEN LENDMAN | [print_link]

Manning, of course, is the courageous Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower, who admitted leaking:

  • “260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables and video of a (US) airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year,” and
  • an “explosive (39 minute) video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the Reuters news agency” – “collateral murder” he felt obligated to expose.

It got him in trouble. On June 7, the military in Iraq arrested him, saying:

Unmentioned was the following:

  • our presence and imperial aims cause harm, not Manning or WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, exposing truths the public has a right and need to know.

In his August 4 Anti-Empire Report (https://www.greanvillepost.com/?p=7246), author William Blum asked

Rubbish according to Blum, saying:

“The only ‘war of necessity’ that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for protected oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, (and) establishment of military bases (there), making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran (besides being a land-based aircraft carrier to target Russia and China). What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? Oh, did I mention that the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex and its shareholders” will profit handsomely?

Daily Telegraph reported:

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai was a former Unocal adviser when pipeline negotiations took place. He was also a CIA asset. Unocal claimed it abandoned the pipeline project. Secret talks, however, continued up to a few months before 9/11, Taliban representatives visiting the State Department, CIA, and National Security Council. They even had a Queens, New York diplomatic office, and US officials visited Taliban ones in Islamabad.

The French newspaper Le Figaro also quoted Arab specialist Antoine Sfeir, saying CIA operatives met with bin Laden (a CIA asset in the 1980s) and maintained contact with him until his training camp was attacked in 1998.

Revealing Disturbing Truths Is Risky

Held initially in Kuwait, a July 29 Baghdad Pentagon press release said:

On August 2, Congressman Mike Rogers (R. MI) told Michigan radio station WHMI that Manning should be executed, saying:

Federal Charges Against Manning

In early July, the Pentagon charged him with four noncriminal offenses, and eight violations of federal criminal law, including one count of violating the 1917 Espionage Act, accessed through the following link:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/06/us-will-press-crimin.html#more

Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) charges included:

  • four noncriminal Army regulations violations, governing the handling of classified information and computers.

If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 52 years in prison.

The Bradley Manning Support Network

Access it for information about Manning through the following link:

http://www.bradleymanning.org/

Its purpose is to:

Nonetheless, the Bush administration preemptively attacked in violation of US and international law. Obama is a war criminal pursuing and escalating it, expanding it cross border into Pakistan, and continuing the Iraq conflict and occupation.

He exposed cold-blooded civilian murders, the public unaware that Pentagon rules-of-engagement (ROEs) target them like combatants in every warfare theater. Waging permanent wars of aggression, America acts lawlessly and recklessly. The public has a right to know. Manning and Assange are heros, deserving plaudits for their courage.

A Final Note

On Sunday, August 8, a public rally will be held outside the Quantico, VA, Marine base, supporting Manning. War criminals remain free uncharged. Manning, an American hero, faces 52 years in prison for exposing their crimes.

Senior Editor Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/