In America, the Rules of Empire Trump the Principles of Democracy

Once again the US procedural republic adds another padlock to the door that would lead the nation onward on the road to democracy.  As has been the case over the last few years, it is the US Supreme Court that has decided to enact the rules of empire at the expense of democratic values. 

This time around, the Court’s decision to render unconstitutional the section of the Voting Rights Act that demands states with a history of discrimination against minority voting rights to submit their plans for changing voting practices, most notably electoral boundaries, for preclearance flies not only in the face of Congress that has voted to extend the Act four times over the last forty years, but also the disturbing results from last year’s congressional elections.

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In defending the controversial decision, Chief Justice, John Roberts reasoned that the country has changed and that “Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

Could Justice Roberts possibly be referring to the Congress put into place by the Great Gerrymander of 2012, where the Democrats received more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin?

Without question, gerrymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement.  For example, in the seven states where Republicans redrew the voting districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats.  This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats, which accounts for the reversal of electoral outcome for the general election, the House majority for the Republicans, and the gridlock in Washington.

Effectively, the Supreme Court decision has effectively made a bad situation worse, but this should not come as a surprize.  The Robert’s Court is also responsible for the infamous Bush v. Gore decision that stayed a judicial recount of the votes cast in Florida, thereby allowing George Bush to steal the election in which he had less of the popular vote and most probably fewer votes from the electoral college – an inconvenient truth that needed to be suppressed by all means.

This is the same Court that also rendered limits on the amounts of money that corporations could spend during elections to be unconstitutional in the equally infamous, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  Remarkably, the Roberts led court found that spending limits to be an infringement on the right of corporations to engage in free speech, (how corporations ever acquired this right, normally  limited to humans, speaks volumes about the political nature of the US Supreme Court ) turning what should be an exercise in democracy into a jaded fundraising and marketing campaign.

Taken together, these three seminal decisions smack of empire because, when stripped to its essence, empire is nothing more than the political embodiment of unchecked greed, and if there is one thing that can reign in the insatiable appetite for wealth, it is the collective will of the majority of Americans; hence the need to undermine democratic outcomes, especially electoral results.

Presently, the greatest threat to America’s corporate plutocracy is the demographic change occurring in the population at large.  In short, the growth in the number of Blacks and Hispanics in the US is rising, while the number whites relative to the population at large is shrinking.  This does not bode well for the Republicans since Blacks and Hispanics overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.  In fact, this demographic shift makes it more and more difficult to elect a Republican candidate to the presidency. 

As a result, in order to prevent a reversal of the flow of wealth extraction in the United States – wealth flowing from the poor to the rich changing direction so that money flows from the rich to the poor – the best that the Republicans can hope for is to control the House of Representatives.  Combined, the Shelby County v. Holder (Voting Rights Act) and the Citizens United decisions increase the capacity of America’s top 1% to do so and to consequently forestall democratic rule in the US from occurring anytime soon.

Brian Gibb (313-500? ppm)

We live by numbers and some more important than others.  Some don’t change often so we keep them in our head: age, date of birth, height, weight, phone number, address, various PINs, salary, and our own social insurance number.  Others vary on a daily basis so we check them regularly like temperature, rainfall, humidity, and wind speed, which are useful to know before setting out from the house in the morning.  Others are fairly abstract: stock market indexes, interest and exchange rates, commodity prices, levels of unemployment, and the latest polling results, which upon hearing may or may not tell us something that we want to know.

Yet, there is one number that everyone should keep in mind – the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.  This is the one number that above all others tells us what life is going to be like on the planet.

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Years from now, when people look at the title of this blog, they’ll be able to deduce that I was born shortly after researchers started to record CO2 readings at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.  The second number is a guestimate of the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere when I die.  Looking at these two numbers, people will have a fairly good idea of what the climate was like during my life and the nature of the climate change I experienced.

They will also know that I lived most of my life during the Age of Stupid, the period of time when despite the warnings from the scientific community, people were hell bent on pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they could by burning as much fossil fuel as they could.

Finally, they will conclude that I lived long enough to see the beginning of the Age of Remorse, the period of time when people realized the error of their ways, but which came too late because the conditions leading to the Great Die Off had been irrevocably set into place.

The New Empire Is American as Apple Inc.

In his influential blog post, Empires Then and Now, the former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts, muses about the nature of the New Empire.  According to Roberts, "the New Empire is different.  It happens without achieving conquest . . . In the New Empire success at war no longer matters.  The extraction takes place by being at war."

In other words, the rules of empire have changed.  Previously, as explored in the aptly named book, The Rules of Empire: Those Who built Them, Those Who Endure Them, and Why They Always Fall, Timothy Parsons maintains that "Empires needed permanently exploitable subjects, not rights-holding citizens to remain viable." 

But as Roberts deftly points out, "Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. . . The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty." Effectively, the boundary between citizen and subject has become blurred.

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To push Robert’s analysis just a bit further based on my reading of The Rules of Empire, rights-holding citizens in America have, for the most part, lost the advantages that citizenship traditionally bestows within an empire and have become permanently exploitable subjects.  In short, it is the hard-working, tax-paying American who picks up the bill for the Wall Street Bailout and the continued funding of the monstrous military-security complex.  On the one hand, he or she has become the guarantor of his own economic exploitation; and on the other, he or she enables corporate America to behave as if their corporations were incorporated on the moon, thereby absolving them of any social responsibility to any terrestrial inhabitants, including those in the United States of America.

Essentially, by extending America’s military might around the world -- more than 1000 strategically-located military bases – the American taxpayer creates the means by which Corporate America can rule global trade indirectly.  Without America’s military might the rules of commercial exchange would not be so favorable for corporations owned and directed principally by Americans.  This explains why a financial transactions tax, sometimes better known as the Robin Hood tax, has yet to be implemented in any meaningful way.

One might expect that the average rights-holding American citizen would ultimately benefit from such an arrangement, this is not the case, unless the said rights-holding citizen happens to be a chief executive officer of an American-directed multinational corporation -- like Apple Inc. 

At last week's US Senate hearings, it was determined that despite being the company with the highest net worth in the world, an estimated $185 billion in 2013, Apple Inc. paid little or no corporate taxes on $74 billion over the last four years.

As reported in the New York Times, Congressional investigators found that some of Apple's subsidiaries had no employees and were largely run by top officials from headquarters in Cupertino, California.  But by officially locating them in places like Ireland, Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless -- exempt from taxes, record keeping laws, and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world.

Evidently, the New Empire is being directed by the Boards of Corporate America's expatriated companies that reap the benefits of having achieved success in American markets, selling goods and services to Americans, employing workers educated in America, supported by a regulatory framework made in America, but who are now taking their money and running to embrace a limbo-like status that severs the civic ties between their corporate rights-holding status and the citizens at large.

Even though they owe the very existence to the legal charter granted by the citizens in which state they were incorporated and now enjoy the rights normally accorded to citizens, again enshrined by the publicly-funded justice system, these expatriated companies, like Apple Inc., have seceded  from the Union.

Indeed, many would identify corporations like Apple and General Electric with the United States but in reality they fly their own flags, and by their corporate behavior demonstrate that their primary allegiance is to their shareholders and not to the American citizens at large.

Saddled with a mountain of debt, witness to a crumbling infrastructure, hoping to eek out a meager existence from social security benefits, millions of Americans can only hope for a better future, while the financiers and members of the corporate executive class amass Great Gatsby-like fortunes in the absence of any empathetic bonds with their fellow citizens.

At the same time we witness the decline of the old American Empire founded upon the spirit of republicanism, we behold the rise and ascension of the New Empire anchored in the belief of unfettered individualism.

Indeed, a new, revised motto should be inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of this teeming shore.  Keep these, the homeless, tempest-tost from me, while I slip out behind the golden door.




























   

Oh Canada, How Long Will You Remain an English Settler State?

The latest statistics from the National Household Survey indicate that one out of five Canadians was born outside of the country.  The report states that "Canada is a nation with an ethnocultural mosaic as indicated by its immigrant population, the ethnocultural backgrounds of its people, the visible minority population, linguistic characteristics and religious diversity.”

So, given this demographic trend, the question that needs to be asked is how long are we going to hold onto a system of governance anchored in our days as a Dominion?
Our head of state, Queen Elizabeth, is, for an ever increasing percentage of the population, a foreign monarch.  As the Canadian population becomes more and more diverse, does there come a point in time when the continued cultural grounding of the nation’s identity in one particular group identity become antiquated?

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For example, when Canada celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1967 and I was a school boy living on the prairies, we would rise and sing “God Save the Queen” to begin the school day.  Back then, it seemed like the right thing to so.  Today, I can’t imagine any school board in Canada requiring that their students sing Britain’s national anthem.  Times have changed.

So, what happens when, in the near future, Queen Elizabeth’s reign comes to an end?  This is the twenty-first century.  The Commonwealth brings about little if any stirrings of patriotic sentiments.  As a result, wouldn’t it seem rather odd that Prince Charles would become our new head of state?

Oh Canada, our home on native land.    

My Democratic Dreams Were Shattered by Those Who Pilfer the Public Purse in Quebec

Apparently, what I want, I can't have.  I would like to live in a democratic state where I could participate meaningfully in the political decisions to be made. Living in Quebec, however, the most corrupt province or state in North America, my democratic dreams are just that, wishful thinking totally out of touch with the banal reality that surrounds me.

Lately, however, thanks to two public inquiries, the Bastarache Commission that looked into the political influence in play when naming judges, and the Charbonneau Commission that is presently investigating the link between the construction industry and the occult funding of political parties with public funds, I now know why my participation in the electoral process and my subsequent court challenge of the voting system was doomed from the start.

In short, for the last thirty years Quebec general elections and many of the municipal elections have been rigged.

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At the municipal level, engineering firms would find themselves a willing candidate, hire a political organizer, funnel the necessary funds for the electoral campaign, and then recoup their investment when the newly elected municipal council would award the contracts for public works to the engineering firm that in effect had chosen who would become mayor.

At the provincial level, the same engineering firms would oversee a process in which individuals would make the maximum donation ($3000) to the political party leading in the polls, and then reimburse the "donors" who had lent their names to the companies that were by law prohibited to make the donations.  The "donors" were then rewarded by a receiving a tax credit for their fraudulent participation in the scheme. The political party that "won" the election would then subsidize the public works projects put forward by the municipalities.

As witnesses to the Charbonneau Commission continue to expose the workings of this system of corruption and collusion, it is now estimated that approximately 80% of the funding for municipal elections and 70% of the funding for provincial elections came from illegal sources.

In other words, the fix was on.

For those of us who were candidates in those elections, in my case I was a candidate for Quebec's Democratic Action Party in the 2003 general election, a candidate for Quebec's Green Party in the 2007 general election and a by-election in 2008, we were played as chumps; we played by the rules that we thought were in place and contributed to the appearance that a fair election was taking place.

Looking back at my participation in the process, I feel that I have been duped.

The real-politick of the situation is that despite the media's depiction of Quebec elections being a clash of personalities and ideas, they were, in reality, just a manifestation of the bourgeois desire to dip into the public purse.

What makes matters worse is that from what I can tell most Quebecers are largely indifferent to what has transpired.

That they have been played for fools doesn't seem to rile them, certainly less than when university tuition fees were raised modestly.

I guess people here have gotten used to being exploited by a domineering class, first the church, now the business-directed political class.

Bread and Circuses are enough to keep the people happy.

Go Habs Go!

It Ain't About the Economy; It's About Politics

At the outset, when I first began this blog, I wanted to bring to the reader’s attention some of the cultural myths arising from our political economy that we usually take for granted and, as a result, don’t give much thought to, ascribing to them instead, the status of received truth.

Unfortunately, we have dropped the adjective, “political” from the term “political economy” and refer to the subject simply as economics, as if it were indeed a hard science, bereft of human desire, emotion, and irrationality.

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This tell-tale omission brings to mind the admonishments George Orwell made in his essay, “Politics in the English Language”, in particular his claim that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The pure wind I have in mind is our political penchant to treat the concept of “the economy” as if it were real and not simply an aggregation of selected statistical data.  This reified entity then becomes subject of all types of conjecture concerning what to do to improve its performance. 

At the moment, the “economic” debate is focused on whether to introduce austerity measures in order to reduce the debt that strangles economic growth – it’s hard not to use metaphors that reify the subject when speaking about the economy – or to continue with deficit spending as a kind of fiscal stimulus that will “jump start” the economy and bring back healthy economic growth, like giving an electric jolt to a severed frog’s leg in a high school biology lab.  Maybe it’s time to give the invisible hand a jolt.

Dropping the figurative language to reveal human intention, it doesn’t really matter whether the prescribed course of action is able to achieve the intended results in the selected data sets.  What’s really at issue is whose ox is going to get gored.  Those who propose austerity measures want the poor of today to pay; those who propose fiscal stimulus want to off load the tab to future generations.

As I have said in a previous blog, sometimes you just have to say “fuck the economy”.

If we are ever going to get our economic house in order (sorry, I couldn’t help myself), spending must be balanced by adequate revenues.  In other words, if you don’t got the money, you gonna have to make due with what you got; if you want more, you gonna have to come up with the cash; and nobody wants to pay more than they have to.

Like I was telling you, it ain't about the economy, it's about politics.

Like Lobsters Caught in a Trap, Americans Are Held Prisoners By Their Procedural Republic

The news coming out of the USA last week was pretty bleak: another senseless act of indiscriminate violence at the Boston Marathon, where two home-made bombs were detonated amongst the spectators, killing three, including a young child, and maiming hundreds.

Yet, against this backdrop of blood running in the streets, the US Senate was unable to adopt a law that would have made it mandatory to perform a background check on any individual wishing to purchase a semi-automatic weapon. The vote was taken only after a few months after a lone gunman went on a rampage in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, also ignoring the fact that more than 90% of Americans favor the implementation of background checks.

It wasn't the case that the motion didn't have the support of the majority of senators, the vote was 54 in favor and 46 against, but in yet another weird twist of the American political system, a simple majority wasn't sufficient to adopt the legislation.  In short, it takes 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster by the opposing political party that effectively defeats the motion.  Instead of letting the minority opposition engage in eternal delaying tactics, the bill was simply dropped.

For the American nation this means that in all likelihood it can expect to witness another mass killing within its immediate future.  Like lobsters caught in a trap, Americans are held prisoner by their procedural republic, a political system that tries to pass itself off as a democratic republic, but in reality is nothing more than a plutocracy.

In fact, because the composition of the American Senate gives an effective veto to states comprising as little as 12% of the electorate, because the entire electoral system is built on the first-past-the-post voting system that discrimates against third-party candidates, because the electoral districts for the House of Representatives are gerrymandered, because it is an electoral college rather than an electotate that determines the outcome of the presidential election, because corporations have the right to spend without limits during electoral campaigns, because voter registration practices effectively suppress voter turnout, the US cannot be considered as a democracy.  In a democracy, it is the many that govern the few; in a plutocracy, it is the few that govern the many.

Taken together the above-mentioned procedures also prevent any meaningful change to the American political system and consequently to the society at large.  Essentially, the US is stuck, despite its incredible technological development, with a social operating system from the 17th century, a way of thinking that dates to the Protestant Reformation and the Pilgrims, and a value system that perpetuates the belief that people get what they deserve, where the rich can wallow in their wealth while the destitute must endure their suffering.

For those at the top the food chain, this hierarchical social system must be maintained at all costs, which includes maintaining the largest military force in the world at public expense and turning a blind eye towards the suffering of those families that are touched directly by the deaths of the appropriately 20,000 Americans killed each year by fire arms. Indeed, the plutocrats show as much concern for their fellow citizens as they do for the lobsters whose fate is to be boiled alive before being served on a plate.

Yet, it costs very little prevent the masses from making any meaningful systemic change. Conservatives need only control only one of the Congressional legislatures or the presidency to bring the entire political system to a standstill.  Since control of all three elected offices is rare, the condition of institutional lock-in has come about. Traditional media sources and social networks may rail at the apparent injustice that regularly surfaces across America, but to no avail because the system is extremely resistant to substantive change.

Like lobsters caught in a trap.