The Empire Has
No Clothes
By Paul Street
Editorial Cartoon: The Emperor - By Bill
Day .
January 27,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Counterpunch"
-
Harsh realities have long mocked United States “elites’”
ritual description of their nation state as a benevolent
beacon and agent of freedom, democracy, and justice at
home and abroad. The mythology doesn’t square with
stark disparities and oppressions inflicted by the
nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of
money, class, race, and empire. The many dark truths
about America behind the nationally narcissistic fantasy
include:
Globally
unmatched and hyper-racialized incarceration rates.
The
imposition of poverty or near-poverty on half the
U.S. population while the top tenth of the upper
U.S. One Percent possesses as much wealth as the
nation’s bottom ninety percent.
The U.S.
ranks ahead of only Turkey, Chile, and Mexico among
thirty-one “advanced industrial nations” belonging
to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development in measures of economic equality, social
mobility, and poverty prevention.
Shocking
levels of racial, ethnic, and gender inequality.
+ The
hyper-segregation and mass criminalization of the
nation’s disproportionately poor Black population.
+ Rampant
domestic police-statism and ubiquitous related
public and private surveillance.
+
Transparently plutocratic electoral and policymaking
systems and outcomes the mark the country as “an
oligarchy” and “not a democracy” (mainstream liberal
political scientists Martine Gilens of Princeton and
Benjamin Page of Northwestern) regardless of which
party or party configuration holds sway in elected
offices.
+ The
cultural and informational dominance of a corporate-
and military-propagandist commercial media owned by
a small handful of communications conglomerates.
+ The
maintenance of more than 1000 U.S. military
installations across more than 100 “sovereign”
nations.
+ An empire
(“defense”) budget that accounts for nearly half of
world military spending and for 54 percent of U.S.
federal discretionary spending.
+ The
absence of affordable quality health care for tens
of millions living in “the world’s richest country.”
+ More than
a third of Black and Native American children live
below the federal government’s notoriously
inadequate poverty level while parasitic financers
and other capitalist overlords enjoy unimaginable
hyper-opulence.
+ The loss
of 93 American lives to gun violence each day.
+ A
recently discovered and unprecedented decline in the
life expectancy for American working class whites.
+ A labor
market in which 94 percent of jobs created over the
last eight years have been temporary, part-time, and
contingent, non-life time contract and “gig” jobs.
+ The
reliance of 1 in 7 citizens on food banks in “the
world’s richest country.”
+ The
rampant pollution and poisoning of air, land, water,
and food, contributing to sky-high cancer rates.
(This is the
short list, taken from the Age of Obama.)
Still, symbols
and marketing matter in selling the American System and
U.S. power at home and abroad. And the perceived
character of the U.S. president is a big part of that
marketing and public relations.
Nothing was
better for portraying the United States as something it
is not – a wise and benevolent, forward-looking agent
and embodiment of freedom and democracy – than the
replacement of George W. Bush by the neoliberal Wall
Street darling Barack Obama in the White House in
2008-09.
It’s not that
U.S. policy changed to any significant degree with the
shift from George W. Bush to Obama. It did not. As the
former longtime top Republican congressional staffer
Mike Lofgren notes in the fourth chapter – tellingly
titled “Do Elections Matter?” – of his important book
The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the
Rise of a Shadow Government (2016):
“In 2008,
Barack Obama the change agent ran against the legacy of
George W. Bush. But when he assumed office, his
policies in the areas of national security and financial
regulation were strikingly similar. Even the Affordable
Care Act, which Republicans vilify with uncontrollable
rage, is hardly different in outline from Bush’s
Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and
Modernization Act (both expand medical coverage by
subsidizing corporate interests)…[Obama was] merely an
ambitious politician who tested well with focus groups,
and who arrived at the right moment, promising hope and
change as a pretext to administer an entrenched system…”
Lofgren might
have added that the “right moment” included the Deep
State establishment’s sense that the American System
needed a significant re-branding in the wake of the
all-too openly plutocratic, stupid, unhinged, and
imperialist Bush’s criminal and bungled occupation of
Iraq and the collapse of the economy by the powerful
financial institutions that controlled Washington and
the White House under Bush43 as under Bill Clinton42.
And that that’s one part of why American presidential
elections do in fact matter to the nation’s wealth and
power elite.
True to the
hopes of the ruling class interests who funded (at
record-setting levels) and otherwise backed his
ascendancy, the
“vacuous to repressive neoliberal” Obama44 was much
better than Bush43 when it came to selling U.S. and
global citizens on the notion that sensible, decent,
balanced, and caring people stood atop the American
Empire. Bush, Lofgren notes, “was a man out of his
depth… a reprise of the hapless James Buchanan on the
eve of the American Civil Was…[he] was clueless and
never one to read briefing memos of any length.” (Like
the figure-head Reagan before him, Dubya was
“deliberately kept ‘out of the loop’” of many key elite
policy discussions.) Obama, by contrast, was “a far more
disciplined student – a constitutional scholar [from
Harvard Law – P.S.], no less, and a man capable of
penning his own rhetorical flourishes.”
That that was
only the beginning of Obama’s marketing value.
Additional assets included his telegenic youthfulness
and perceived novelty, his status as the nation’s first
technically nonwhite and multicultural president, and
his thoroughly fake progressive campaign imagery.
Obama was
The Empire’s New Clothes, the title of my
2010 book on his first year in office. It was a great
public relations coup for the American “Democracy,
Incorporated” (to use the late Princeton political
scientist Sheldon Wolin’s phrase for what he called the
United States’ “inverted totalitarian” mode of
“corporate-managed democracy”). Who better to complete
the no strings attached-bailout of the great financial
institutions that pushed the economy over the cliff, to
re-fashion the imperial project, and to pass a
watered-down corporate and finance-friendly version of
health insurance reform than a brash, handsome, and
seemingly (superficially) left-leaning first Black
president endowed even with a “Muslim name,” no small
symbolic asset in the wake of Bush’s mass-murderous
provocation of the Muslim world?
The great
hopey-changey bamboozlement was impressive, aided and
abetted by some very silly Scandinavians at the Nobel
Peace Prize committee. The antiwar movement, still
semi-active in Dubya’s second term, collapsed almost
completely under Obama. It stayed mostly somnolent
while the nation’s first Black president launched a
drone war program that became “the most extreme
terrorist campaign of modern times” (Noam Chomsky) and a
catastrophic regime-change in Libya – all this this
while dispatching murderous U.S. Special Forces across
Africa and to more nations than any U.S. commander in
chief before him. Droves of liberals and even some
self-declared leftists (who can ever forget the
relentless and nauseating absurdities of Carl Davidson?)
had Obama’s back as he dutifully served the
aforementioned unelected and deep state dictatorships,
helping create the vacuum and set the stage both for the
rise of the Tea Party and the ascendancy of Donald
Trump.
And now the
American System is saddled with the public relations and
marketing dilemma that is the openly white-nationalist,
nativist, racist, misogynist, eco-cidal, authoritarian,
stupid, reckless, thin-skinned, narcissist, and
Twitter-addicted Donald. That the Deplorable One is,
like Dubya, a “man out of his depth” was suggested by
his first full day in the White House. Confronted with
massive, historic demonstrations protesting his
Inauguration and across the nation, Trump went to the
headquarters of the CIA and stood before the hallowed
CIA Memorial Wall (engraved with the names of OSS and
CIA agents who lost their lives in service to U.S.
foreign policy/imperialism) to deliver a childishly
petulant and impromptu rant on the “liberal” media’s
supposed under-estimation of the number of people who
attended his Inauguration speech. Even more strange,
Trump told the CIA that the Islamic State arose because
the U.S. failed to “keep the oil” when it invaded Iraq
and said that “maybe we’ll have another chance” to take
Iraq’s oil. CNN anchor and former CIA intern Anderson
Cooper reported that “senior CIA officials sat
stone-faced” during this bizarre performance.
The Iraqi oil
comments must have gone over well in the Middle East and
the Muslim world (I was asked to reflect on them by a
Middle Eastern television network within five minutes of
their utterance).
The elite
cringing isn’t about any serious concern for Iraqi
sovereignty, of course. For the U.S. establishment,
Trump poses a threat to Brand America. It is
longstanding bipartisan U.S. ruling class doctrine that
the United States is the world’s great beacon and agent
of democracy, human rights, justice, and freedom.
American Reality has never matched the doctrine, and it
didn’t under Obama, of course, but it is especially
difficult to credibly align those claims with a
candidate and now a president like Trump, who has openly
exhibited racist, nativist, sexist, arch-authoritarian,
police-statist, Islamophobic, pro-torture, and even
neo-fascist sentiments and values. “If our system of
government [under Obama as under George W. Bush and
under Bill Clinton and their predecessors – P.S.] is an
oligarchy with a façade of democratic and constitutional
process,” Lofgren wrote in the preface to his book’s
paperback edition last summer, “Trump would not only rip
that façade away for the entire world to behold; he
would take our system’s ugliest features and intensify
them.”
Along with real
policy differences they have with Trump’s right-
“populist,” “isolationist,” and “anti- ‘free trade;”
rhetoric, that is why the nation’s overlapping economic
and foreign policy “elites” preferred Jeb Bush and Marco
Rubio over Trump in the Republican primaries – and
Hillary Clinton over Trump in the general election.
And now Donald
the Ripper sits with other vicious and all-too
transparently sociopathic swamp creatures like the
quasi-fascist Steve Bannon atop the visible U.S. state,
where marketing and branding matter to those wielding
real and continuous behind the “marionette theater” of
electoral and parliamentary politics. The Empire, once
again, has no clothes.
Paul
Street’s latest book is They
Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
