No sign of democracy, if democracy means people from the Amendment element. First Chile, now us, was the word circulating on the animal farm. And most perceptive people couldn't be blamed if they pointed the finger at the "independent" and above-the-law nature of the Federal Reserve, headed by the "fanatic follower of Ayn Rand" Alan Greenspan, who had had been "appointed by Reagan in 1987 and distinguished since 1990 by his spectacularly inaccurate yet frequently repeated predictions before Congress that economic recovery was under way." He even kind of looked like a witch doctor, some folks said. And had just flat-out told the American middle class that he didn't care who was in charge of the trashy workings of government -- he was in charge of monetary policy and beyond the reach of representative restraint. Cockburn wants to know: "Where were the sermons from Greenspan or his successor Ben Bernanke about the inflationary potential of stock-option fortunes lofted on the hot air of crooked accountancy and other kindred conspiracies?" That's rhetorical.
But the answer came anyway in the form of the collapse of the insurance giant AIG in the 2008 financial meltdown. St. Clair sees a direct line from the 'neutral' policies of the Fed and its loosened regulations that led to ordinary people walking around like they were dead. St. Clair begins his CounterPunch smashmouth piece, "Masters of Perfidy: The Crash of AIG," by pointing out the overlooked obvious: "AIG manufactured precisely what it was meant to guard against. Namely, risk. Extreme risk." It was enough to do your head in. St. Clair went further:
Ultimately, AIG was cashiered on several trillion dollars of risky financial products, sewn together by Ivy League math whizzes and aces in the arcane art of arbitrage. These were fanciful consolidations of debt that no sane insurer would ever have indemnified. When the company crashed in the dismal autumn of 2008, it turned sheepishly to the insurer of last resort for rescue: the U.S. government. The disgraced executives made the case that the rot in AIG was spreading and was threatening to go systemic. Too big to fail became the mantra of the bailout. AIG, perhaps the most recklessly managed company in the world, was so thoroughly enmeshed in nearly every sector of the American""and even global""economy that to let it sunder would be to risk the crash of the nation. Or so they said.
Too big to fail. If only they felt that way about the planet we share.
But why share? These foxes put in charge of the coop went My Lai on the chickens and then pleaded for more chickens because their appetite was too big to quell. f*ckers. According to Glen Ford, in a piece for Black Agenda Report, "Why Barack Obama is the More Effective Evil," Obama's cooperation in the bailout was totally telegraphed beforehand. Ford wrote,
Bush's bailout failed on a Monday. By Friday, Obama had convinced enough Democrats in opposition to roll over - and the bailout passed, setting the stage for a new dispensation between the American State and Wall Street, in which a permanent pipeline of tens of trillions of dollars would flow directly into Wall Street accounts, via the Federal Reserve.
So Obama gave them more chickens and he was rewarded with "Terror Tuesday" sessions at the White House where he got to decide in his situation room which "terrorist" would die-by-drone overseas in the following weeks (Council on Foreign Relations estimate: The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians). St. Clair and Joshua Frank have analyzed and deconstructed and cataloged the Obama catastrophe in their book, Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press, 2012).
In "Camus in the Time of Drones," St. Clair helps us further see how such a sense of Too-Big-To-Fail, and knowing you're above the law, can morph into a foreign policy that, as with a hostile takeover of a country, has the new bosses cutting back on expenses to maximize profit -- and here come the drones. Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, said of the drone game that Obama,
What lies at the nexus of Obama's targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong.
Sounds like Wall Street. And it sounds like the new gangster posture that has come at us like Kid Blast and the Gangbusters, since the towers fell on 9/11 and the global security apparatus put eyes on us all -- the internet of everything and, as Ed Snowden warned, producing a Permanent Record on each of us. We are all potential dissenters who need watching, and the implicit Stasi-like threat it implies.
St. Clair opens his short drone piece by alluding to Albert Camus and the gruesome end by guillotine witnessed by his father, an account passed on to his mother and then to him. St. Clair writes, "[The account] haunted the writer all his life. The gruesome scene appears in his novels The Stranger and The First Man and became the centerpiece of his masterful essay "Reflections on the Guillotine," perhaps the most forceful denunciation of the death penalty ever written." In his essay, Camus draws the conclusion that execution by the state is primarily intended to terrorize. "A form of murder that is performed, in theory, in the name of the citizens and for which they are complicit," writes St. Clair. Days of Caligula.
Obama has made complicitors of us all. And St. Clair connects Camus to Obama:
So what would Albert Camus, the great moralist of the 20th century, think about the latest innovation in administrative murder, Obama's drone program, a kind of remote-control gallows, where the killers never see their victims, never hear their screams, smell their burning bodies, touch their mutilated flesh?
The conscience of the killer has been sterilized, the drone operator, fully alienated from the act he is committing, can walk out the door after his shift is over and calmly order an IPA at the local microbrew or play a round of golf under the desert sky. He is left with no blood on his hands, no savagery weighing on his conscience, no degrading images to stalk his dreams.
Complicity is corruption; gangsta sh*t, blood on everybody's hands; and woe to the few who dissent. Assange, with the help of Bradley/Chelsea Manning, released video proof of US war atrocities in the form of "Collateral Murder," military footage of the gunning down of unarmed civilians and some Reuters reporters.
In addition, the footage showed what a so-called 'double tap' looked like -- the waiting for help to arrive and then gunning them down, too. The American military got good at gunning down weddings, seemingly so that they could get at the funerals that followed. "Drone strikes, Camus would argue, are not just meant to kill," writes St. Clair, "They are programmed to terrorize." He adds,
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