[Peace-discuss] 'We told you so' is cold comfort

Sat Oct 19 04:50:52 UTC 2013

There might really be a greater evil.

On 10/19/13 12:25, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> A Lethal Competence
>
>
>   Empire of the Senseless
>
> by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
>
> 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.
>
> 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 /Wall Street Journal,/ 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> The politics of lesser evilism remains a crippling /idée fixe /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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Liberals seem to have finally come to terms with their own vacuity.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
> ###
>
>
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