The Corruption of the American Republic

By Michael Howard
Source

According to Gallup Poll, record numbers of American citizens—16 percent—are eager to permanently move to another country. For Americans aged 15-29, the figure nearly doubles to 30 percent. Likewise for the poorest fifth of the country, 13 percent of whom wished to emigrate under Obama. A quarter of these dreamers would reportedly select Canada as their new home, in spite of universal healthcare and other egalitarian horrors. And yet, Gallup also reports that the United States remains the number one destination for “potential migrants” in other parts of the world, mostly Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, not, alas, Scandinavia, Trump’s preferred source of immigrants.

What do we know that they don’t? For starters, life expectancy in The Land of the Free has been trending down for the last two years, which is more or less unheard of in a developed country not at war. Drug overdoses and suicides are way up, the latter by more than 30 points since 1999. Of the more than 39,000 deaths via gunshot in 2017 (the most in five decades), almost two-thirds were self-inflicted. There were more than 300 mass shootings in the US in 2018. Happiness, indeed, is a warm gun.

In other news, the richest 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. About 40 percent of American families owe debt worth far more than the sum of their assets. Wages for working people, when adjusted for inflation, haven’t risen in more than four decades, and in fact peaked in 1973. The supposed unemployment rate is only “low” because it doesn’t factor in the untold numbers of people who have given up looking for decent jobs that don’t exist, shipped abroad thanks to bipartisan “free trade” agreements. The routinely cited figure of 4 percent is meaningless. Food insecurity, or “a lack of available financial resources for food at the level of the household,” affects over 40 million Americans, including 12 million children, per the USDA. Roughly the same number live without health insurance, unable to afford the extravagant premiums and deductibles.

At the same time, our corporate masters get fatter off wealth, not that they create, but rather fish out of the economy using rent-seeking tactics and horde in offshore tax havens. Economist Michael Hudson employs the term “fictitious capital,” which he describes as

purely extractive claims for income, as distinct from profits and wages earned from tangible means of production. Real capital referred to factories, machinery and tools, things that were used to produce output, as well as education, research and public infrastructure. But an ownership privilege like a title to land and other real estate, a patent or the monopoly privilege to charge whatever the market will bear for a restricted patent, without reference to actual production costs, does not add anything to production. It is purely extractive, yielding economic rent, not profits on real capital investment.

We the People, of course, must remain in blissful ignorance of these realities, lest we all immigrate to Canada or, better yet, come together and form a common front against corporate power and its marionettes on Capitol Hill. The latter prospect must never be allowed to materialize. Hence the identity politics game, in which all sides happily participate, egged on by the corporate media. Politicians play the game because it’s the only way they can appeal to their base. Subsidizing the rich, kicking working people into the gutter, destroying the planet and starting wars for all kinds of ulterior motives—all bipartisan projects—aren’t likely to mobilize voters. They require diversionary issues: guns, gay marriage, abortion, immigration, gender, patriarchy, white privilege, racism, statues, sexual misconduct, pronouns, Jesus, etc. Many are serious subjects worthy of attention and debate, but it’s important to recognize that they’re being exploited by the owners of the economy, and thus the country, as instruments of deflection and division.

These topics are permitted a place in the national discourse via the major media because they have nothing to do with class—indeed, they completely obscure the issue of class, pushing it beyond the margins of public consciousness. While we squabble about whether this or that building ought to be renamed, the ruling class is picking our pockets and using the money to populate Congress with loyal servants.

Bernie Sanders threatened to explode this long-standing architecture of psychological manipulation. Therefore he had to be stopped. And he was. But then Clinton got Trumped. There’s the rub. Trump the (Enfant) Terrible ascended to the throne, and the Crisis of Democracy commenced. Or so the crafty Dems would have us believe. In reality, Trump, with his deranged jingoism and petulant narcissism, is only marginally worse than the majority of miscreants infesting Washington, which is saying an awful lot. He’s a nasty scourge on what was already a deeply corrupted and diseased republic, no doubt God’s judgment on the US for all the bloody horrors it has unleashed upon the rest of the world.

Don says he has accomplished more in his first two years in office than any other president. Let’s take a look. So far he has used unilateral military force against a sovereign state twice, hacked the corporate tax rate down to 21 percent, quit the Paris climate accord, started a trade war with China, moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, stopped funding the UN program for Palestinian refugees, condemned the International Court of Justice, tried to pass a healthcare bill that would have thrown millions of Americans off their insurance, unilaterally voided the Iran nuclear deal, unilaterally imposed sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, etc., threatened to militarily attack Venezuela, deployed more troops to Afghanistan, attacked migrants at the US-Mexico border, separated migrant children from their parents, enlarged the military budget to more than $700 billion, sent armaments to Kiev, expelled Russian diplomats over the dubious Skripal affair, negotiated a contract to sell billions of dollars’ worth of munitions to the barbaric regime in Riyadh, refused to condemn the cold-blooded murder of Jamal Khashoggi, blackmailed Africa by threatening to stop funding peacekeeping missions, hired reptiles Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, promised to terminate the INF, and promised to expand the US’ nuclear arsenal.

All of which is appalling; all must be opposed. As it happens, Trump’s main opposition, led by the Democratic Party and their toadies in the media, and known formally by their cultish name, The Resistance, are every bit as repellent and, yes, dangerous as he is. Even before Hillary Clinton lost the election, her campaign had an excuse up their sleeve: it was them Russians. Four months after the election, Clinton’s former propaganda minister Jennifer Palmieri revealed the new Democratic agenda in the Washington Post. “If we make plain that what Russia has done is nothing less than an attack on our republic, the public will be with us. And the more we talk about it, the more they’ll be with us.””Democrats should push for this relentlessly and above all else. They should talk about it in every interview.””If those Republicans feel enough heat for helping Vladi­mir Putin attack the United States to assist Trump, they will abandon the White House and support an independent commission.”

Let the neo-McCarthyism begin! Clinton’s formula worked like a charm. Soon a strident anti-Russia groupthink had solidified among the mainstream liberal media. Blind, deaf and dumb as a result of their personal hatred of Trump, readers of the New York Times and viewers of MSNBCswallowed every Trump-Putin collusion story whole, no matter how wild or unsubstantiated. Many turned out to be, literally, fake news. Glenn Greenwald wrote about this phenomenon at length for The Intercept. Journalists challenging or simply asking questions about the veracity of the official narrative were, are, dismissed as “useful idiots” and “Kremlin stooges” (ouch!). A long list of alternative media were slyly smeared in the Washington Post as pro-Russian propaganda websites. Maniacal conspiracy theorists became Collusion Gurus on Twitter and have since gained a degree of mainstream legitimacy, popping up now and then on cable news. War criminal George Bush was rehabilitated after giving a piece of candy to Michelle Obama. Neoconservative screwballs like Billy Kristol and Max Boot were embraced by The Resistance for their valiant anti-Putin conformity.

Moreover, the alleged Russian hack was likened to both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, so often that the outrageous analogy grew banal and laughable—though not perhaps for those who lost friends and family in those genuine attacks on the United States. “This is our Pearl Harbor, our 9/11,” is how one particularly demented analysis in Politico concluded. “In the past, we have risen to the defense of our values, our ideologies and our institutions. It’s time for another fight.” Bomb’s away!

Therein lies the danger of The Resistance. Like all cults, its single-minded purpose, in this case confronting and provoking and isolating Russia, overrides all other considerations. Most cult members celebrated Trump’s most egregious doings, like attacking Syria and shipping weapons to Ukraine, both of which had the potential to ignite a major military crisis. This is what The Resistance craves. Conflict with nuclear Russia. What would you rather have: A president with a mind to collude with Russia, or one with a mind to invade Russia? I think, and fear, that a considerable percent of the American public would oft for the latter now. For that we can thank The Resistance.

New START, the treaty reducing and limiting active warheads stockpiled by the US and Russia, is set to expire in 2021. Putin spoke about it during his annual press conference in December, asserting that there “have not been any negotiations” with Washington to renew the agreement. “We know how to secure our safety. But, in general, it’s very bad for humanity as it takes us closer to a very dangerous line. It is a very serious question and it is a shame it is being underestimated … We are now witnessing the collapse of the international system of nuclear containment.” He’s been issuing these warnings for years. In 2016 he said: “You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger—this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.” Indeed.

In their pathological mission to avenge their humiliating loss to Donald Trump, the Democrats and their mindless followers have completely lost the plot and are turning the entire world into a powder keg. Every candidate in the 2020 primary will have to have as a central pillar of his or her campaign a fanatic hostility to Putin and Russia generally. They’ll have to talk tough about taking Putin on, about defending NATO from nonexistent Russian aggression, about protecting the homeland from further Pearl Harbor-like attacks. Forget about rapprochement—how likely is an extension of New START? As we’ve seen, merely having a conversation with Vladimir Putin is now akin to high treason. Heaven forbid we open a line of diplomacy with Moscow and cooperate on issues of international security.

Regardless of who wins the White House in 2020, US-Russia relations will worsen—hard to envisage—and the risk of nuclear war will increase. Upgraded and modernized tactical nukes, designed for use on the battlefield, as they’ll only vaporize 10,000 instead of 100,000, are being manufactured and added to our weapons systems as I write. It’s a miracle we got out of the first Cold War alive. Now we’re marching, to the beat of the liberal war drum, headlong into another.

Meantime, the republic will continue to go to rot that the empire may live a little longer, all discretionary money going to the Pentagon and containing The Russian Threat. Infrastructure and education will decay, healthcare will remain a corporate racket, suicides will keep going up, life expectancy down, wages will stay static and, most consequentially, society will continue pulling itself apart, an organized fight for real equality more remote than ever before. All will be subordinated to the imperatives of corporate domination and military hegemony. Nothing else matters.

On September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin addressed the Constitutional Convention with the following words:

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

Two-hundred and thirty-one years later, have we become so corrupted?

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

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