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Chosen Leaders,
Proven Failures and Political Debacles
By James Petras
December 05, 2016
"Information
Clearing House"
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With a few notable
exceptions, political leaders are chosen by political
leaders, and not by electorates or community-based
organizations or popular assemblies. Popular media
figures and the so-called ‘pundits’, including academics
and self-declared experts and ‘think-tank’ analysts
reinforce and propagate these choices.
A collection of
terms and pseudo concepts are essential in validating
what is really an oligarchical process. These concepts
are tagged onto whoever is chosen by the elite for
electoral candidates or for the seizure of political
power. With this framework in mind, we have to
critically analyze the symbols and signs used by popular
opinion-makers as they promote political elites. We
will conclude by posing an alternative to the
‘propaganda of choice’, which has so far resulted in
broken pre-election promises and political debacles.
Language and Pseudo-Concepts: Subterfuges for
Manipulated Choices
The usual
suspects in the business of mass-manipulation describe
their political leaders in the same folksy or
pseudo-serious terms that they attribute to
themselves: Experts/ intuitive improvisers/ trial and
error ‘muddlers’. The ‘experts’ often mean wrong-headed
policymakers and advisers whose decisions usually
reflect the demands of their current paymasters. Their
stated or unstated assumptions are rarely questioned and
almost never placed in the context of the contemporary
power structures. The experts determine the future
trajectory for their political choices. In this way,
the views expressed by ‘experts’ are primarily
ideological and not some disembodied scholarly entity
floating in an indeterminate space and time.
Pundits often
promote ‘experience’ in describing the ‘experienced’
leader, adviser or cabinet member. They denigrate the
opposition candidate adversary as ‘lacking experience’.
The obvious questions to this platitude should be: ‘What
kind of experience? What were the political results of
this experience? Who did this experience serve?
We know that
Secretaries of Defense William Gates and Donald Rumsfeld
and their leading assistants, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas
Feith were appointed to their high positions and praised
for their ‘experience’. This ‘experience’ drove the
country into repeated disastrous military engagements,
political debacles and unending wars. It would be
better to reject officials who are highly ‘experienced’
in creating disasters and appoint those
officials experienced in conciliation and
reconciliation. Unfortunately the ‘experts’ never
discuss these matters in any historical context.
Many political
choices are adorned with ‘titles’, such as ‘successful
entrepreneur’ and/or ‘prize winning journalist’. This
ignores the fact that those ‘bestowing titles’ come from
a narrow band of inbred organizations with financial,
military or ideological interests looking for
near-future rewards from their now titled, prize winning
political choice.
Highly
certified candidates, we are told, are those eminently
qualified to lead, whether they are university academics
with prestigious degrees, or doctors, lawyers, or
investors who work for leading groups. The most highly
vetted officials coming from Harvard University have
implemented economic policies leading to the worst
crises in the shortest time in world history.
Lawrence
Summers, PhD and Harvard University President-turned
Treasury Secretary participated in the pillage of Russia
in the 1990’s and then brought his talent for sowing
international chaos home by joining Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan. These two ‘experts’ promoted
enormous financial swindles, which led to the worst
economic crash in the US in seven decades.
Money
laundering by the big banks flourished under Princeton
Summa Cum Laude and US Treasury ‘Under-Secretary for
Terrorism and Financial Intelligence’, Stuart Levey.
Levey concentrated on implementing brutal economic
sanctions against Iran shutting US businesses out of
multi-billion-dollar oil deals with Tehran, promoting a
huge annual $4 billion-dollar giveaway to Israel and a
granting a uniquely privileged trade status for the
Jewish state – which cost the US taxpayers additional
billions.
Receiving
‘prestigious awards’ does not predict a successful
policymaker in contemporary US politics. The underlyingideological
commitments and political allegiances determine the
appointment of these ‘prize-winning’ leaders. From an
objective perspective, any obscure college economics
graduate, eager to increase high tech US exports and
sign profitable trade agreements with Iran, would have
been far more successful political choice as Secretary
of Treasury.
Frequently
‘identity’ colors the choice of appointees, especially
favoring an ‘oppressed’ minority, even if their field of
competence and their political allegiances run counter
to the real interests and political needs of the vast
majority of American citizens. Some ‘ethnic’ groups
wear their identity on their shirt sleeves as a point of
entry into lucrative or influential appointments:
“Hello, I’m a Jewish graduate of Yale Law school, which
makes me the best choice for an appointment to the
Supreme Court … where there are already three Jews out
of the ten Justices… and only an anti-Semite would
consider a fourth to be an ‘over-representation’ of our
tiny national minority…whereas the total absence of any
WASPs (white Anglo-Protestants) on ‘The Court’ only
confirms their historical degeneracy…” Who could object
to that?
‘Identity’
appointees are not reluctant to employ scare tactics,
including citing old historical grievances and claiming
special suffering unique to their heritage, to justify
their appointment to privileged, lucrative positions.
Their identity also seems to insulate them from any
fall-out from their policy catastrophes such as
disastrous wars and economic crises, as well as
providing impunity for their personal involvement in
financial mega-swindles.
Race and claims
of victimization often serves as a justification for
being a political ‘chosen one’. We are told repeatedly
that some appointee, even with a tangential link to skin
color, must have suffered past indignities and is
therefore uniquely qualified to represent the
aspirations of an entire group, promising to eliminate
all inequality, right injustices and promote peace and
prosperity. Racial identity never prevented three of
the worst Caribbean tyrants from robbing and torturing
their people: The two Haitian dictators, ‘Papa Doc’ and
‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier murdered tens of thousands Haitians,
especially among mixed race educated elites. Cuban
dictator Fulgencio Batista had to slaughter hundreds of
Afro-Caribbean sugar workers in Santiago de Cuba before
he could enter the exclusive ‘whites only’ Havana Golf
and Country Club.
In the United
States, it was a ‘man of color’, General Colin Powell,
Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, who
bombed and invaded black African Somalia and implemented
the policy of invading and destroying Iraq and
Afghanistan. The carefully groomed ‘First Black
President-To-Be’ Barack Obama, was the protégé of a
Chicago-based millionaire lobby led by the fanatical
‘Israel-First’ mob, to bring ‘identity’ to its highest
level. This charade culminated in the ‘First Black
President’ and promoter of seven devastating wars
against the poorest people of the world receiving the
Nobel Peace Prize from the hands of the King of Sweden
and a committee composed of mostly white Swedish
Christians. Such is the power of identity. It was of
little comfort to the hundreds of thousands of Libyans
and South Sahara Africans murdered, pillaged, raped and
forced to flee in rotting boats to Europe, that the NATO
bombs destroying their country had been sent by the
‘Historic Black US President and Nobel Peace Prize
Winner’. When the wounded captive President Libya
Gadhafi, the greatest proponent of Pan-African
integration, was brutalized and slaughtered, was he
aware that his tormentors were armed and supported by
‘America’s First Black President’? A video of Gadhafi’s
gruesome end became a source of gleeful entertainment
for the ‘Feminist’ US Secretary of State, Hillary
Clinton, who would go on to cite her ‘victory’ over the
Libyan President in her bid to become ‘The First Female
President of the US”.
The question is
not about one’s race or identity, but whose
interests are served by the Afro-American leader in
question. US President Barack Obama served Wall Street
and the Pentagon, whereas Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King had a long and arduous history of leading peoples’
movements. MLK joined the striking Afro-American
garbage workers in Memphis and the autoworkers in
Detroit. Malcolm X organized and spoke for the Harlem
community – while inspiring millions.
Gender labels
covered the fact that a politically chosen woman ruled
on behalf of a family-led tyranny, as in the case of
Indira Gandhi in India. The financial lords of the City
of London financiers, and the mining and factory bosses
in Great Britain chose the very female Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, who launched multiple wars abroad and
smashed trade unions at home. Madame Secretary of
State, Hillary Clinton, who promoted seven wars
resulting in the deaths, injuries, displacement and rape
of 5 million African and Middle Eastern women and
destruction of their families, had the unconditional
support of the top 20 Wall Street banks when she ran to
become the ‘First Woman President of the United States’.
In other words,
political appointments chosen for their ‘gender
identity’ bring no special qualities or experience that
would recommend them as progressive. When political and
business elites choose a female for a high political
office, they do so because it serves their interests to
put a progressive political gloss on their reactionary
policies. The ‘gender emphasis’ is most effective on
liberals and the advocates of ‘identity over class
politics’. In reality it is a vacuous symbol rather
than real power and highlights elite upward mobility.
Often media
moguls, publicists and corporate leaders laud the
‘social background’ of a candidate. They use such
criteria to groom and coopt upwardly mobile workers,
trade union officials and community militants. ‘Chosen
leaders’ from minority or oppressed backgrounds are put
in charge of discipline, work-place speed-ups and
lay-offs. They sometimes adopt ‘workers’ language,
splicing rough anti-establishment curses with their
abuses as they fire workers and cut wages. One’s past
social background is a far less useful criterion
than current social commitments. As Karl Marx long ago
noted, the ruling class is not a closed caste: It is
always open to co-opting bright and influential new
members among upwardly mobile labor leaders and
activists.
Labor leaders
receive ‘special favors’, including invitations to
political inaugurations and corporate meetings with all
the travel and luxury accommodations paid. Elites
frequently transform past militant leaders into
corporate policemen, ready to identify, exclude and
expel any genuine emerging local and shop floor
militants. Public and private labor relations experts
frequently describe a labor militant’s ascent to the
elite as an ‘up by his own bootstraps
operation’ – putting a virtuous gloss on the
‘self-made worker’ ready to serve the interests of the
corporate elite! The primary feature that characterizes
these ‘boot-strappers’ is how their sense of
‘solidarity’ turns upward and forward toward the bosses,
and not backward and downward toward the working masses,
as they transform into ‘boot-lickers’.
Many examples
of these ‘upward and forward’-looking political
choices are found among entertainment celebrities,
sports heroes, media figures and pop musicians. Rap
singers become ghetto millionaires. And ‘working-class
hero’ rock musicians, the well-wrinkled as well as the
young, charge hundreds of dollars a seat for their
rasping and grasping performances while refusing to play
on behalf of striking workers…
The popular
music, promoted by the elite, contain country and
working class lyrics, sung with phony regional twangs to
entertain mass audiences even as the successful
performers flaunt their Presidential awards, luxury
mansions and limos. The political and corporate elite
frequently choose phony working class or ethnic identity
celebrities to endorse their products, as the gullible
public is encouraged to purchase useless commodities,
electronic gadgets and gimmicks, and to support
reactionary politicians and politics. There are a few
celebrities who protest or maintain real mass solidarity
but they are blacklisted, ostracized or past their peak
earning power. Most celebrities prefer to shake their
backsides, mouth raunchy language, snort or smoke dope
and slum a bit with their bodyguards, but the political
elite have chosen them to distract and depoliticize the
young and discontented. They are paid well for their
services.
Conclusion
The concepts,
symbols and signs of the ruling class determine who will
be the political ‘choices’ for leaders and officials.
Political elites co-opt upwardly mobile ‘identities’,
among minorities and workers, carefully assessing which
of their qualities will contribute to the desired elite
outcomes. This is how working class and community-based
electorates are seduced into voting against their real
class, national, community, gender and racial economic
interests.
Renegades,
demagogues, soothsayers and other charlatans of many
races, ethnicities, genders and proclivities run for
office and win on that basis.
The elite pay a
relatively small fee for procuring the services of
prestigious, certified, titled and diversified
candidates to elect or appoint as leaders.
Elite power only
partially depends on the mass media, money and power.
It also needs the services of the concept
and language masters, identity promoters and
propagandists of the embellished deed.
Stripping away the
phony veneer of the ‘chosen’ politicians requires a
forceful critique of the signs and symbols that cloak
the real identity of the makers and breakers of these
leaders. And it requires that they be exposed for their
proven failures and disasters, especially their role in
leading America into an unending series of political,
military and economic debacles.
James
Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology
at Binghamton University, New York.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
