<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><font size="-1"><div class="subheadlinestyle">A Lethal Competence</div>
<h1 class="article-title">Empire of the Senseless</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR</div>
<div class="main-text"><p>For the sake of argument, let’s assume the following to be true:
Barack Obama is not a stooge, a cipher, an empty suit, or a puppet. He
is not incompetent, indecisive, or deranged. He is, in fact,
intelligent, purposeful, and rational. Let us further assume that Obama
is sincere in his actions, if not always his rhetoric, and that his
actions, from the persecution of whistleblowers to the assassination of
American citizens, are premeditated, planned, intentional and taken
without ambivalence.</p><p>What do we make of this? On the surface, it means that Obama is as
culpable as he is capable. His icy certitude has always been his most
grating affectation. Yet there is no one to hold him accountable for his
crimes against the Constitution, high and low, not even the Visigoths
of the House. Despite the daily hysterics fulminating from the
editorial page of the <i>Wall Street Journal,</i> Obama is the choice of
the elites, the man they want at the helm at this fraught moment for
global capitalism. It’s his competence that makes him so dangerous.</p><p>Obama is the executive manager of what the British punk band the
Mekons called the “Empire of the Senseless”. By this, I don’t mean an
empire that is inchoate, but a government that doesn’t sense, that
doesn’t feel, that is immune to the conditions and desires of the
governed. America has degenerated into a sham state, a republic of the
observed and monitored, where government operations are opaque and
menacing. A pervasive dread seems to envelope the nation.</p><p>So, in the face of this reality, we confront, once more, Lenin’s
piercing question: what is to be done? This is not a metaphysical
exercise any more, but an existential and practical one of the most
extreme urgency. How do we respond to an ossified state that serves
abstract interests yet remains chillingly indifferent to human
suffering? Moreover, where do we turn when the institutions that once
served as forces of social change are now largely kaput.</p><p>The politics of lesser evilism remains a crippling <i>idée fixe </i>for
most of the Left, despite the carnage strewn across the landscape by
the politicians they have enabled over the last two decades: from the
Clintons to John Kerry and Obama. The Democratic Party itself has become
a parody of a political enterprise, a corporate-financed ghost ship for
the gullible, the deluded and the parasitical. For all practical
purposes the party has been superceded as a functional entity by
pseudo-interest groups like MoveOn and their new house organ, MSNBC,
which provide daily distractions from and rationalizations for each new
Obama transgression.</p><p>To a great measure, the responsibility for the fatal ease with which
Obama has been able to implement his draconian policies, from domestic
spying to drone strikes, must be borne by the timid response of the
political left, who have serially denied what they knew to be Obama’s
true agenda, an agenda of neoliberal austerity at home and imperial
aggression abroad—an agenda that was incubating from the moment the
young senator hand-picked Joseph Lieberman to be his ideological mentor
in the US Senate.</p><p>Predictably, the more they indulge Obama, the more he tends to
ignore, if not psychologically resent, their existence. For most of us,
the economy is still crashing. A recent analysis by UC Berkeley’s
Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics,
revealed that 95 percent of the economic gains since the recession began
have been captured by the top one percent. This was not an accidental
outcome. Obama’s economic plan was geared to generate precisely this
result. But no one wants to talk about it on the Left.</p><p>Witness the president’s rare conclave with the Congressional Black
Caucus. With black poverty and unemployment rates at startling highs,
Obama swatted away meek queries about the savage toll his economic
policies have inflicted on urban America and pressed the delegation to
publicly cheerlead for his scheme to shower Syria with cruise missiles.
The CBC members sat mutely, soaking in Obama’s humiliating lecture,
while black America remains under a state of economic siege.</p><p>This brazen act was soon followed by Obama’s announcement that he had
picked Jeffrey Zients to head the National Economic Council. Who is
Zients you ask? Well, he was a top executive at Mitt Romney’s Bain
Capital, plotting takeovers, mass firings, raids on pensions and
de-unionization of factories. He did so well at this grim job that his
net worth now tops $100 million. One might view this appointment as an
act of casual sadism, rubbing salt in the wounds of progressives. But
the Left is so moribund, so deeply immured in a political coma that the
insult didn’t even prompt the slightest protest, not even a vestigial
yelp for old time’s sake.</p><p>Liberals seem to have finally come to terms with their own vacuity.</p><p>What about the rest of us? What do we do? Here we must turn to the
heroic revelations of Edward Snowden, which denuded the government’s
aspirations toward a kind of roving omniscience, probing and recording
the most intimate beliefs and intentions of its citizens. After the
initial tingles of paranoia fade, we might be able to view this as a
perversely liberating condition. What a relief! We no longer have to
hide our discontent, our efforts to make sense of the senseless. We are
free to become the sovereigns of our own actions without fear of
disclosure.</p><p>And so we remain, nearly all of us, left and right, clinging
stubbornly to the tiny freedoms that remain: to object, to denounce and
to resist, until a real oppositional force emerges. Or SEAL Team Six
shows up at the back door.</p><div><br></div><div>###</div></div></font></body></html>