Question Everything! |
The Nation's New Crime Boss
By John Davis
November 22, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - "Counterpunch"
- -A great deal of energy was expended
recently to influence who would be the next
president of the criminal enterprise that is the
United States of America. The nation’s
criminality was established historically by its
extermination of indigenous populations
inconvenient to its imperial goals and its
enslavement of Africans expressly imported into
the country under hideous conditions for the
further ease and enrichment of the already
wealthy. Although these were crimes initiated
long before the formal constitution of the U.S.,
when the slave trade was belatedly outlawed in
1808, slaves were bred in the Upper South and
driven in chains across the country or shipped
down the Mississippi to be sold in the Deep
South. There, they joined their brothers and
sisters in an industrialized system of enforced
labor cruelly driven by the whip. The expansion
of cotton across the south required the removal
of Indian tribes who lived on the land the
plantation owners wished to cultivate. Their
forced removal included documented acts of
genocide.
The nation’s criminality continues into the
present, most egregiously but not exclusively,
by its refusal to make adequate reparations for
these historical acts of inhumanity; by its
acceptance of the violently racist policing of
minority populations; by its ongoing program of
mass incarceration of non-white men and boys; by
its deportation of so called ‘illegals’ and by
its frequent refusal to give asylum to those
fleeing dire political, economic, and
environmental conditions south of the border for
which the U.S. is primarily responsible.
Government sanctioned domestic executions,
extra-judicial drone hits on foreign subjects,
which may on occasion also kill American
citizens, and numerous instances of
psychological and physical torture inflicted on
its perceived enemies, domestic and foreign,
further impugn the probity of the state. A
federally sanctioned health care system that is
leveraged for corporate profit rather than human
need represents a systematic attack on the
well-being of large sections of the civilian
population, and thus can be considered a crime
against humanity. All the while, the nation’s
nuclear-armed war machine, embedded in its
planetary network of military bases, pursues
declared and undeclared wars, creating a global
backdrop to the nation’s domestic offenses.
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The current president has done
nothing to correct this underlying criminality.
Indeed, he has exacerbated it by his personal
corruption, his fostering of the inhumane
treatment of migrants at the country’s southern
border, his explicit support of racist, white
nationalism and, arguably, his criminal
mismanagement of the federal response to the
Covid-19 pandemic. The incoming president,
however, is deeply enmeshed in the vicious
turpitude of Empire, a condition to which he has
either actively contributed or passively
countenanced during his thirty-six years in the
Senate and his eight years as vice president.
Now that the leadership decision has been made,
most of the population is split between
jubilation and anguish. On the other hand, I
spent the long and fevered days of this election
in a state of relative equanimity, invested in
neither the continued leadership of the family
currently at the helm nor in the now imminent
installation of a family that not only has a
long history of enabling this criminal
enterprise but has also personally benefited
from its association with the highest echelons
of the Empire’s leadership. It would have been
useful to have maintained the illusion that the
recent contest was between private notions of
corruption as practiced, for instance, in the
world of casinos, real-estate development,
hotels, private clubs and golf resorts, versus
the public corruption of influence peddling as
practiced, for instance, in the Empire’s
outlands where it can be sold in markets awash
with armaments and cold hard cash. But such
distinctions are razor thin. Thus, there is
little reason for either jubilation or anguish
at the result. More meaningful perhaps, is to
gauge the erstwhile contestants’ wider
responsibility, as accessories to the
maintenance of the establishment under which the
broader sins of Empire are permitted to
flourish.
In this time of a recalcitrant lame duck who, it
is widely proclaimed, threatened and continues
to threaten ‘democracy’ - the fig leaf of
respectability under which the nation’s
criminality festers - liberal triumphalism is
shadowed by a residual anguish that rises to
fever pitch when confronted by criticisms of
Biden, or suggestions raised, in the enclaves of
the enlightened, that he is not the savior whom
we all seek. Those liberals whose egos are bound
up in the defeat of the incumbent remain
immensely fragile - their inner core beaten to a
pulp by the ungainly, ungrammatical, incoherent,
Trump, and their sense of propriety deeply
wounded by the déclassé president.
In early November, sufficient ballots made their
way into the hands of upstanding election
officials for reliable confirmation that
Trumpworld had foundered on the shores of the
deep state. The president’s political insurgency
is now forestalled, at least until 2024. But
this is hardly cause for celebration when his
defeat has resulted in the reaffirmation of
business as usual, a business which, for half a
millennium, has thrived on the exploitation of
the great many for the enrichment of the very
few, and which, in the modern state, is now
expressed as neoliberalism – an ideology which
comfortably accommodates the state’s criminal
offenses. While this criminality is primarily
predicated on an invidious taxonomy of human
worth, the government’s gaping ethical void also
allows for the relentless breeding, fattening
and killing regimes of factory farmed livestock,
and permits the gross, unsustainable
exploitation of botanical, lithic, and chemical
elements for industrial use. The nation’s vast
historic and contemporary mining of fossil
biomass and its conversion into cheap thermal
energy has significantly contributed to the
chemical restructuring of the Earth’s atmosphere
and to the resultant global warming. The cheap
energy of oil and gas has metastasized urban
development and enabled rural monocropping which
together have decimated the biological diversity
of the U.S. land mass. These profoundly
existential planetary ills exist as the ultimate
brand extensions of the criminal enterprise that
is the United States.
Almost four years of the Trump insurgency have
not changed these fundamental realities, but
they have shifted the terms of the debate.
Generals, politicians, lawyers, financiers, the
intelligence community, tech entrepreneurs,
factory farmers and developers lay awake at
night because one of the levers of power over
which they believed they had some control was
wrested from their hands by an uncultured,
overweight, racist, loud-mouthed, sexist pig.
For that we should be grateful, for it exposed a
vulnerability that has rarely been evident in
the almost impregnable bastions of wealth, power
and privilege that exist at the core of this
nation. It was, as so many in this country
recognized and related to, a moment in which the
cunning of the uncouth triumphed over the
self-servingly venal noblesse oblige of the
well-born, well-educated, well-dressed and
well-mannered.
Now, we are about to return to a time when the
evils of Empire operate with impunity, fully
protected within the carapace of democracy, that
shell of legitimacy that occludes its own
fraudulence and shelters the broader larcenies
of the state. The porcine face of corruption
soon departs to be replaced by the establishment
candidate who has, over his almost five decades
in subaltern power, faithfully served the
super-rich and the egregiously powerful whose
interests are served by their government’s
inhumane criminality.
Any euphoria experienced in Trump’s dismissal
must surely be tempered by the depression that
descends upon consideration of the impending
elevation of Biden, poster-boy of the Peter
principle, to the highest political post in the
land. A career politician deeply mired in
mediocrity, connivance and compromise; he
reached his apotheosis in the eight years he
served as Obama’s wingman. Infinitely less
patrician and vastly less intelligent, he was
nevertheless an appropriate ornament to Barack’s
imperial presence, emphasizing the president’s
blackness in ways unavailable to the man
himself. Now, he will be assisted in his work of
walking back every mildly progressive program
blithely promised during his lackluster
campaign, by Prosecutor Harris: younger,
smarter, more ambitious and far more ruthless
than her boss. Thus threatened, we can be sure
that her role in the traditionally thankless
task of vice-president will be further
trivialized by ‘The Big Guy’ and reduced to a
token signifier of his commitment to The
Movement for Black Lives.
Biden’s elevation to the Presidency will
critically constrain the development of a
progressive agenda within the Democratic party
for a further four or eight years and likely
assure a more aggressive foreign policy. In the
last half-century, there was never a military
action, CIA assassination, or trade sanction
against a foreign power that he meaningfully
opposed. Despite campaign trail disavowals, we
can expect a continuation of Obama’s criminal
war in Yemen as well as the cessation of troop
withdrawals from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The generals will be back in charge.
Long-time recipient of thin blue line union
support, Biden is incapable of delivering peace
on our streets - which demands a defunding of
their militarized police presence. The future
president’s commitment to the continued success
of the health insurance industry will fatally
constrain the development of socialized health
and welfare provisions. Wall Street will
continue to be privileged over Main Street.
Already reneging on his campaign promise to ban
fracking, he remains supportive of the country’s
oil industry and seems increasingly confident in
his eschewal of the Green New Deal.
The nation’s new crime-boss-elect is a man of
mind-numbing mediocrity, but he will, I suspect,
be hugely successful in sustaining the criminal
enterprise with which the electorate has
entrusted him.
John Davis is an architect living in southern California. Read more of his writing at urbanwildland.org