[Peace-discuss] Fw: SF CHRON: The Rise of American Czarism

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Sirota" <ds at davidsirota.com>
To: <unionyes at ameritech.net>
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 10:41 AM
Subject: SF CHRON: The Rise of American Czarism


> FYI - Attached is a special piece the San Francisco Chronicle asked me
> to write for its Sunday Insight section the weekend before the
> inauguration. It looks at the lurch toward American czarism, and what
> it portends for the new administration. - D
>
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/17/INGP158S4G.DTL
>
> U.S. Moving Toward Czarism, Away From Democracy
>
> By David Sirota
>
> San Francisco Chronicle, 1/18/09
>
> History's great American parables teach that if anything unified our
> founders, it was a deep antipathy to dictatorship. As bourgeois
> revolutionaries from Boston to Philadelphia courageously split with
> the British crown in 1776, they created three equal branches of
> government to prevent, in the words of James Madison, "a tyrannical
> concentration of all the powers" in a president's hands.
>
> For two centuries since, civics books, Hollywood biopics and party
> convention speeches have constructed a mythology insisting that this
> democratic commitment to checks and balances makes our country a
> beacon of freedom - the "shining city on a hill" overlooking a
> despotic world below. We are told that democracy's tumult - its messy
> debates, legislative sausage-making and electoral friction - is the
> best way to guarantee that public policy represents public will,
> therefore making us a strong and durable nation.
>
> If that is true, then every patriot should be concerned about the
> intensifying efforts to supplant democracy with something far more
> authoritarian. Call it American czarism.
>
> That term should be as impossibly oxymoronic as crash landings and
> deafening silence, considering our Constitution's desire to create a
> "government of laws and not of men," as John Adams said. But politics
> is filled with paradoxes from Reagan Democrats to Obama Republicans,
> and czars - i.e., policymakers granted extralegal, cross-agency
> powers - have become increasingly prevalent in our government over
> the past century.
>
> After the Great Flood of 1927, for instance, President Calvin
> Coolidge named Herbert Hoover the federal government czar overseeing
> relief efforts, and Hoover subsequently appointed "dictators" (he
> actually used that term) to help coordinate the response.
>
> During the power consolidations of the New Deal in the 1930s, a Time
> magazine story headlined "Dictator or Democrat" reported on the
> "suspicions of those throughout the nation who have an uneasy feeling
> that  Roosevelt, under cover of the emergency, is
> trying 'to slip something over' on democracy." In the 1940s and
> 1950s, parks commissioner Robert Moses - famously known as "the power
> broker" - amassed so much personal authority that he was able to
> almost single-handedly redesign New York City. And lately, presidents
> have given us poverty, energy, drug, health and even Iraq war czars.
>
> Until now, this slow lurch toward czarism has primarily reflected the
> ancient, almost innate human desire for power and paternalistic
> leadership. The current president reminded us that executives see
> all-powerful "deciders" when they look in the mirror. And Americans -
> sans kings to rally around - have been elevating commanders in chief
> to superhero status well before Barack Obama's Marvel comic-book
> debut and George Bush's flight-suited "Top Gun" impression in 2003.
>
> In recent years, this culture of "presidentialism," as Vanderbilt
> Professor Dana Nelson calls it, has justified the Patriot Act,
> warrantless wiretaps and a radical theory of the "unitary executive"
> that aims to provide a jurisprudential rationale for total White
> House supremacy over all government. But only in the past three
> months has American czarism metastasized from a troubling slow-growth
> tumor to a potentially deadly cancer.
>
> In October, Congress relinquished its most basic oversight powers and
> gave Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sole authority to dole out
> billions of bailout dollars to Wall Street. At the same time, it did
> nothing when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke used fiats to
> commit "$5 trillion worth of new money, loan guarantees and loosened
> lending requirements," according to Politico - all while he refused
> to tell the public who is receiving the largesse.
>
> And the Washington Post has reported that lawmakers may appoint a
> "car czar" who "would essentially control the purse strings" of an
> auto industry bailout and "could force Detroit's Big Three automakers
> into bankruptcy" if he or she didn't like their behavior.
>
> Put bluntly, the unprecedented usurpation of spending power by the
> executive branch and the Federal Reserve is systematically
> undermining our democracy's most sacrosanct principle - the one that
> is supposed to ensure "the legislative department alone has access to
> the pockets of the people," as Madison said. And this new czarism is
> so strident because it reflects both executive power lust and the
> 21st century economy.
>
> Today, keystrokes and mouse-clicks instantly whisk trillions of
> dollars across the planet, and many of those keystrokes and
> mouse-clicks are uninhibited by the grindingly slow processes of
> democracy.
>
> Saudi princes don't have to publish announcements in a federal
> register before moving cash from sovereign wealth funds into foreign
> investments. China's rulers aren't obligated to obtain legislative
> approval when buying or dumping U.S. Treasury bills; and
> transnational corporations will not wait for public hearings before
> shuttering offices, eliminating jobs and cutting off credit.
>
> Our nation is integrally connected to this fast-moving globalized
> economy, and American czarism effectively posits that in order to
> compete, we must anoint strongmen as saviors, prioritize speed
> instead of sobriety and emulate dictatorship instead of democracy.
>
> Indeed, the Economist magazine's prediction that the "economic crisis
> may increase the attractiveness of the Chinese model of authoritarian
> capitalism" is coming true right here at home, as we seem ever more
> intent on replicating - rather than resisting - that model.
>
> This, as much as personal hubris, explains why Paulson and Bernanke
> sought unprecedented latitude in spending trillions - they want to be
> able to move as fast as their autocratic counterparts in other
> countries, and believe congressional oversight will slow them down.
>
> It explains why UC Berkeley economist Laura Tyson says we need an
> auto czar who will "take a number of approaches to this problem that
> are already known, that have been discussed endlessly, and force it
> through" - because to economists, a czar quickly "forcing it through"
> is more important than any consideration for democratic deliberation.
>
> And it explains why when Obama aides this week demanded complete
> control over the second half of the Wall Street bailout funds, House
> Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D- Mass.,
> shirked his oversight duties and said he's "willing to accept their
> word" that they will spend the money responsibly. In a czarism,
> that's what legislators do: "accept the word" of the czar.
>
> In sum, it explains why the age-old struggle between capitalism and
> democracy is once again defining our politics - and why capitalism is
> now winning.
>
> That triumph may be terrific for the czars and great for their
> industry suitors, but as the founders would likely agree, it is a
> Pyrrhic victory for America.
>
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