In a previous post I quoted fellow DUer, 27inCali, on what many people, including me, believe to be perhaps the most fundamental problem that our country faces – the problem that lies at the root of
all of our other problems. The main theme of 27in Cali’s post, titled “Someone needs to say it”, is that our country is largely controlled by powerful shadowy figures:
Obama doesn't really have the power to do a lot of the things we wish (and I'm sure he wishes) he could. He had to kiss a lot of rings to even get permission to run for President, let alone be ALLOWED to win…. The President doesn't run this country, international banks and a handful of super-rich families do…. We have to realize that our Democracy is fucked up to the point that the President really can't change the big injustices inherent in the system. The last one that tried got his head blown off in front of his wife in Texas….
Some people call these shadowy powers “The Powers That Be”. Others refer to them as the Military-Industrial Complex, as President Eisenhower did in
his farewell address to our nation. Others refer to them as “the deep state” – contrasting them with the public state which the American people elect to represent them.
Peter Dale Scott, in his book, “
The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire and the future of America”, summarizes the essence of the problem we face at the beginning of his last chapter:
Will we deal with the problem of terrorism primarily by working to resolve issues that provoke conflict and projecting values that the rest of the world will wish to share? Or will we trust primarily in our own military power and become increasingly a garrison state and empire, conducting more and more of our global strategies in secret and projecting our military and covert strength into further and further corners of the earth?
The cult of secrecy in government, though necessary in some areas, has become counterproductive… It makes it easy for special interests to falsify intelligence input and not be corrected. We saw this recently with Ahmed Chalabi’s disastrous advice on Iraq… This book has argued that secrecy has served America even worse on the policy level. We need to admit that the secret powers of our government helped to create and train this enemy (al Qaeda), whose presence is now invoked to further augment the government’s secret powers. Those secret powers themselves are becoming the major threat to the survival of the open republic.
Some manifestations of shadowy powersThe manifestations of these shadowy powers are everywhere. One of the most obvious and prevalent is that our elected representatives routinely refuse to abide by the wishes of those who elect them to serve their interests. For example, Americans have for decades
desired a universal health care plan to ensure that they receive adequate medical care. Yet time after time, powerful interests arise to thwart that goal.
Another manifestation is the unified efforts of our corporate controlled media to control not only the news that Americans hear but what they say and think. As I discussed previously in a post titled “
Unmentionable Things in American Politics”, these efforts focus especially on our elected representatives:
There are numerous things that absolutely cannot be mentioned by American politicians because they are …. well, “embarrassing to our country”. Mere mention of these things brings down the wrath of conservative pundits and moderates as well, and even some who consider themselves to be liberal or progressive. The wrath is likely to be so intense that few U.S. politicians dare mention these things because of the risk of being booted out of office – or worse. Three such things are: 1. the stealing of a U.S. presidential election; 2. referring to American military or covert actions as immoral, rather than merely as “misguided”; and, 3. imputing bad intentions, rather than mere incompetence, onto a U.S. president.
Peter Dale Scott discusses several specific examples in his book. One is the Reagan administration’s plans for expanding so-called plans for “Continuity of Government” (COG).
“Continuity of government” is a reassuring title. It would be more honest, however, to call it a “change of government” plan, since according to Alfonso Chardy of the Miami Herald, the plan called for “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to FEMA, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments, and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.” The plan also gave the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which had been involved in drafting it, sweeping new powers, including internment.
More ominous are the widespread detention camps, as part of a plan called “
Endgame”:
In August (2002)… (Attorney General) Ashcroft disclosed a plan that “would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitution rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatant”… After widespread protest from legal scholars, the plan for military detention camps was not discussed publicly further. It seems clear, however, that the camps exist and that… the authority already exists for them to be used… On February 6, 2007, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff announced… more than $400 million to add sixty-seven hundred additional detention beds. Both the contract and the budget allocation were in partial fulfillment of an ambitious ten-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named Endgame, authorized in 2003.
SolutionsScott discusses the monumental task of replacing the deep state with a public state in the last chapter of his book. Before doing that, he discusses Hitler’s Nazi Germany as an analogy, in which the Nazis and their secret concentration camps were the equivalent of the modern deep state. He says:
I do believe that U.S. citizens should study Germany in the 1930s, to see how a civilized nation, under stress, momentarily lost track of its inherent moral virtues and lapsed into a disastrous course of repression, xenophobia, and ultimately war… They too were vaguely aware that members of another ethnic group were being rounded up and illegally detained, yet they too felt unable to do anything about it.
Scott believes that replacing the deep state with a public state will require an approach between the two extremes of working within our current system and attempting to totally replace it. In doing this, we must strengthen and unite our civil society, which is currently widely divided. There are several issues that we must address:
Recognize growing income disparity as a threat to our public state and address itGrowing income disparity is a major problem not only in the United States, but world-wide and between nations. Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General,
has noted that the combined wealth of the richest 225 individuals in the world (over $1 trillion) is equal to the combined annual income of the world’s poorest 47% of people. With such tremendous disparity in wealth, is it any wonder that so few people control the lives of so many?
Of course, inequality of wealth is just one manifestation of numerous related failures of social justice. Naomi Klein, in her book, “
The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, discusses how gross disparities in wealth can lead to disastrous public policy.
Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it. This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are Christian end-timers… The Rapture is a parable for what they are building down here – a system that invites destruction and disaster, then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine safety.
It was one of President Roosevelt’s fondest desires to ensure social justice through what he called “The Second Bill of Rights”. In his
1944 State of the Union message he enunciated that principle:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We’ve accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are:
Opportunity
The right to a useful and remunerative job…
The right to a good education
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies…
Security
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
The right of every family to a decent home.
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
The establishment of social and economic justice strengthens civil society by eradicating some of the major causes of fear, hatred, and conflict.
Oppose preemptive warWar can be a source of
tremendous profits for a nation’s elites, and it can be used to keep a nation’s populace in a constant state of fear and insecurity. In so doing, it provides an opportunity for governments to exercise strict control over its citizens and erode their constitutional rights in secrecy. Scott sums up the advantages of war to the deep state:
The need to combat terror is currently being used as justification to increase the dominance of the deep state at home, and to justify ongoing oppressive U.S. occupation of such foreign territories as Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to develop the consciousness that such occupation in the long run is more a cause of terrorism than it is a remedy.
Reform the electoral processIn 2004, George W. Bush was “elected” to a second term largely on the strength of the
illegal purging of at least a couple hundred thousand voters in Ohio alone. Another major problem is electronic voting machines that produce unverifiable results, which probably led to many
fraudulent elections in the early years of the 21st Century.
Money in politics also corrupts our democracy. Bill Moyers explains the problem in a nutshell in his book, “
Moyers on Democracy”:
We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”.
Let’s call it what it is: a bribe.
Reform the “War on Drugs”Our so-called “War on Drugs” not only provides a tremendous asset for the deep state from its
participation in the international drug trade, but it also is a great way to keep a nation’s citizens under government control.
International statistics from 2006 show that the United States has an incarceration rate of
738 per 100,000 population, the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Approximately
2.3 million persons are incarcerated in the United States as of October 2006, which is a far higher number, by almost a million, than any other nation in the world, accounting for about one quarter of the world’s incarcerated population.
Statistics on racial disparity in prosecuting the “War on Drugs” raise serious issues of social justice. The racial disparity in the United States for imprisonment for drug offenses is well known. Though the
Federal Household Survey (See item # 6) indicated that 72% of illicit drug users are white, compared to 15% who are black, blacks constitute a
highly disproportionate percent of the population arrested for (37%) or serving time for (42% of those in federal prisons and 58% of those in state prisons) drug violations.
Break up corporate control of the mediaBill Moyers has pointed out that the protection offered us by our First Amendment is based on the assumption of a separation of our government and a free press, which is supposed to protect us from government abuses. When that separation disappears,
fascism, whose primary characteristic is the fusion of government with corporatocracy, replaces democracy. Moyers explains:
What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.
Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration (speaking of the Bush administration) so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and – in defiance of the Constitution – from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know.
As Peter Dale Scott points out in his book, our corporate news media is less a source of information than it is a tool for thought manipulation.
A final note – on the prospects of unity in U.S. civil societyI’ve said before that when enough Americans recognize how the powers that be attempt to manipulate their beliefs, their manipulation will become much more difficult. This idea is related to Scott’s contention that a strengthened and unified civil society is one of the keys to restoring the public state. That is because one of the major reasons why our society is so divided today is the misinformation that so many Americans receive through their corporate media.
But the widespread use of the Internet is changing the situation. In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, a
Pew Research Center poll showed that 74% of Americans received most of their national and international news through television, 45% through newspapers, and only a paltry 13% through the Internet. But by 2008, the Internet had surpassed newspapers as the second most common source of news, and it lost out to television only by 70% to 40%. Scott has this to say about the potential power of the Internet to unify civil society:
With so many Americans getting news from the Web, and from alternate and foreign media sources, it was possible in 2004 to mount a challenge to voting irregularities in the 2004 Presidential election… In the long run… the winning side tends to be the one whose weapon is the truth. Widespread use of the Internet and alternative media has done much to shorten the length of time it takes for political truths to be heard. As long as the alternate sources are there, the widespread recurrence of censorship and lies in the major media must be taken as a sign of the establishment’s weakness, not its strength. It will be important to monitor whether the Internet remains free… I believe that if it does, the American republic will be secure, despite challenges from above. Thus Internet freedom is like a canary in the caverns of our modern mass society…
The Web has created the makings of a multinational civil society and public arena in which there is a shared global interest in matters of justice and injustice in and for all nations, perhaps especially in the United States.
Scott ends his book by commenting on the prospects for unity in our country:
With a triumphalist Bush presidency it is possible that Americans of many differing opinions will be moved to unite in defense of the public realm of the republic, against the unpopular and indefensible overreaching of the deep state. This book is dedicated to the strengthening of that possibility.
Scott’s book was published in 2007. Well, it appears that the Bush presidency did
not yet result in a united civil society. In fact, the election of a new US President may have indirectly resulted in further division of our country, as various political leaders have used the occasion to stir up racial prejudices and hatreds. It will be a great test of the American character to see to what extent we can resist that tendency in the long run.