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Full text of "What's Important: The Seven Pillars of Misrule"

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The Democrats may not be united with a firm position in opposition to the
Iraq war, and may not have worked out their plans for extricating the U.S.
from that sad country, but the American public knows who is to blame for
the disaster that is Iraq, and that those responsible work at the White
House. As a result, it's possible that as the Republicans continue to
implode in arguments and scandals, the Democrats may take the House of
Representatives in November. This would be the ultimate rejection by the
American people of Bushism and what it stands for: the last throes of
world domination by the U.S. imperium.

3. America's war(s) at home: If you can't control events on the ground
far away, control as much as you can at home.


In one sense, it appears that the wars and oil schemes abroad are mainly
designed not so much for actual conquest as for providing a powerful
platform from which to control the domestic political equation at home.

Put another way, all politics is local, even (or sometimes especially)
international politics.

If you're authoritarian-minded, want to keep citizen-participation
democracy at bay, and get and keep your hands on all the levers of power,
what do you do? Answer: Demonize somebody externally, overhype that
dastardly enemy out to get you, thus rousing the nationalism and
patriotism of the population internally, while at the same time
identifying a scapegoat group (say gays, or Jews, or blacks, or Latino
immigrants), who are deemed to be responsible for a lot of what ails you
and your way of life.

In our own time, the crimes of a few Islamic extremists/terrorists
provided the rationale ("a new Pearl Harbor") both for an external U.S.
crackdown and a tightening of the political/legal screws internally. The
population, through various phony psy-ops carried out by the government,
and egged on by a complicit mass media, was manipulated into a state of
hyperfear that only the federal government supposedly could assuage. "Give
us carte blanche to protect you, and we'll ensure that you sleep safe and
sound" -- that was the Faustian bargain.

It doesn't matter whether this bumbling Administration actually can
deliver on its promises (look at the national-security sieve that is the
Department of Homeland Security); the point is that the governing group
remains in power, to help themselves and their friends as they loot and
distort the treasury and assume control over various aspects of American
economic and political and social/private life perhaps for a generation or
more.

4. The Constitution: A politically sacred document or just "a goddamned
piece of paper" (a slur ascribed to Bush some months back)?


In order for an extremist crew to take and maintain control of the
political and social aspects of a society, the traditional foundations
must be weakened, demeaned and destroyed. In American society, that
foundation, which worked ably for more than two centuries, is the
Constitution of the United States, founded on well-based suspicion about
the tendency of all governments to assume too much power unto themselves,
at the expense of the citizenry.

To counteract that tendency in the new American government, our Founding
Fathers created an ingenious system of checks and balances that divided
power up into many pieces; no one branch or faction or majority could
easily run roughshod over another. The Legislature makes the laws and
finances their implementation; the Executive administers the laws and
deals with foreign policy; the Courts weigh the laws and determine which
ones are congruent with the Constitution. And keeping them all honest is a
protected, independent press that serves as the peoples' investigatory
voice and conscience.

But, in our own time, the Executive, mainly through aggressive secrecy,
has amassed nearly total power over the entirety of our political
structure. Bush&Co. not only exercise control over the Executive Branch,
but also over a quiescent, rubber-stamp Congress run by the same forces as
in the White House (with the GOP treating the opposition Democrats as
enemies to be ignored or destroyed). In addition, Bush has abrogated to
himself the right to simply veto any aspect of Congressional legislation
he doesn't like. So far, he's indicated that 750 bills passed by Congress
are subject to his "signing statements" that assert his right to violate
those laws at will; for samples of those statements, see

here
).

In addition, Bush and Cheney are, under both a "unitary executive" theory
and an "inherent powers" theory deriving from Article 2 of The
Constitution, claim that they can violate whatever laws they wish as long
as they say they're doing so to "protect and defend" the American people
during "wartime" -- a "war" that turns out is a permanent one, since it's
against a tactic (terrorism) that will always be used somewhere. And
Bush&Co. are maintaining, under the "national-security" cloak, that the
courts have no right to interpret their actions; even if some courts do
choose to intervene, Bush officials have appointed so many of their own
ideologue judges to the federal appeals courts and to the U.S. Supreme
Court that they feel they are covered for all eventualities.

One more screw gets tightened: The "press," now the "mass media," are by
and large owned and controlled by the same cast of wealthy,
ideologically-driven characters now in power in the Executive Branch, the
result of which is that many millions of citizens rarely hear the truth of
what is being done in their names by their government. The intended
journalistic watchdogs have become lapdogs for those in power.

In short, Bush&Co. has pretty near a stranglehold on information and its
dissemination; to get true investigative reporting on a consistent basis,
citizens must seek out foreign media or head for the internet websites and
blogs, our new "alternative press," which reach far fewer readers than the
mainstream outlets. Even so, the government and its corporate supporters
are moving to defang the internet, by severely restricting open-access to
the internet superhighway by proposing privatization of the on-ramps.

The result of all this is that the balance of powers envisioned by the
Founding Fathers, and kept alive and well for more than two centuries
since then, is badly out of whack, so much so that a kind of native
fascism is aborning (eerily reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s) and it's
not clear, short of impeachment and conviction, how it can be reversed in
time to prevent any more Constitutional damage and foreign wars before the
next scheduled presidential election in 2008.

5. Electoral Integrity: "It's not who votes that count, it's who counts
the votes." -- Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin


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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (more...)
 
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