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Edited on Sun Feb-19-06 04:26 PM by arendt
Spoiler: no happy ending.
arendt
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The Secret Aristocracy Emerges from Its Gilded Bunkers by arendt
"The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of tribute extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put...Kleptocracies with little public support run the risk of being overthrown, either by downtrodden commoners or by upstart would-be replacement kleptocrats seeking public support by promising a higher ratio of services rendered to fruits stolen.
"Kleptocrats throughout the ages have resorted to a mix of four (ways to stay in power):
1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite... 4. construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy...
- Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs, and Steel"
Last week, the public coronation of America's heretofore secret aristocracy began in earnest. The leader of that aristocracy's shadowy government dropped the mask of democracy and dared anyone to do anything about it. Dick Cheney simultaneously claimed un-Constitutional executive power to declassify information, arm-twisted the Senate into not investigating the massive warrantless NSA wiretapping program, and got off with nothing more than another demerit on his already abysmal PR report card for stonewalling the police and the media for days about his shooting one of his fellow kleptocrats at one of their gilded bunkers in the Texas outback.
It seems that the aristos have finally decided (based on their demonstrated ability to use the corporate media to spin their way out of responsibility for any action or the need to tell the truth on any subject) to turn Cheney's total contempt for democracy from a liability into an asset. It was time to announce that they were saving America's democracy by destroying it. Henceforth, America will be an "anti-terrorist" police state fighting a forever war against Emanuel Goldstein. And, in keeping with American tradition, it will be the best police state that money can buy - complete with warrantless wiretaps by a dictatorial executive, secret police, secret courts, not-so-secret torture, built-by-Haliburton "detention centers", unaccountable mercenaries like Blackstone and DynaCorp, and a secret aristocratic government, with Congress cavalierly demoted to the level of Caligula's horse. Given the fatal-for-democracy sodomizing the democratic rump in Congress just took from Sam Elito, it is hardly surprising that the mask dropped mere weeks after the last branch of Constitutional government fell to these lunatics.
As politically aware Americans already knew, and the rest of the couch potatoes may dimly realize someday, secrecy is a seamless racket. After institutionalizing secrecy, so that people can't find out exactly how they are being screwed, the aristocratic screwers add insult to injury by calling any victim who speaks out about the secrecy a "conspiracy theorist". But, by definition, conspiracy theories are the political equivalent of the hallucinations caused by sensory deprivation, i.e. darkness and the inability to obtain any sensory input. Belief in conspiracy theories is a commonplace in a repressed society, where many of the theories are started by the authorities to discredit inconvenient people. The infamous and immortal conspiracy theory "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" began its bloody march through modern history as a provocation by the Czarist Secret Police.
But, since nothing is totally useless, the rest of this essay describes how the fall of the first American republic was engineered as a case study in systems failure for future writers of Constitutions - should we be so lucky as to ever have such people again.
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America was a unique creation at the time of its founding - a democracy born free from aristocracy. It took the Industrial Revolution to throw up the gangsters known as the Robber Barons to rule as America's first aristocracy. The Robbers owned the government for roughly fifty years, until they ran America into the ground in the Great Depression. That is when their rank indifference to the suffering they had caused made them so unpopular that they basically were forced "underground" - that is, into a lower public profile, into their gilded bunkers. But, they never forgave Franklin Roosevelt for saving America from the Fascism they would gladly have allowed to happen and for giving "their" money to the unwashed masses.
The Bush family is one of the charter members of the secret aristocracy. Bush, Sr.'s father was part of the Brown Brothers, Harriman crowd prosecuted for dealing with the enemy in the middle of World War 2.
After that war, the secret aristocracy founded the CIA as an old-boy network of lounge lizard Ivy Leaguers, led by fanatics like Alan Dulles and fruitcakes like James Jesus Angleton, and populated by princelings like George Bush, Sr. The CIA set about overthrowing democracy wherever it dared to question the prerogatives of the local toadies of the American secret aristocracy. It made Iran safe for American oil companies, Guatamala safe for United Fruit, and Chile safe for ITT. At the moment of overthrow, these countries were all democracies with democratically elected leaders who happened to be left-leaning. The CIA's contribution to building democracy in South Viet Nam was the murderous Phoenix assassination program. By the time Nixon was president, the CIA had earned a reputation for out-of-control violence and concentration-camp-doctor ethics.
There was much theorizing to the effect that the CIA overthrew Nixon for poaching on their turf with his secret gang of burglars and spies. But the real Deep Throat turned out to be the number two guy in the FBI - the long-time competitor of the CIA in the secret power struggle to stifle Americans' civil rights in the name of anti-Communism. And, the outcome of Watergate was to momentarily shine daylight on the egregious nature of CIA covert actions, including political assassinations and LSD experiments.
Unfortunately, it was too late to stop the CIA. Protected by ranking members of the secret aristocracy, the "wet boys" simply moved their covert operations from the public sector to the private. They became contractors for the secret aristocracy and began to directly undermine the American government. The 1980 elections, like Nixon's election in 1968, were corrupted by the Republican party's illegal entry into foreign policy - intriguing with a foreign government to embarrass the opposition party. Anyone who thinks that the Iranian release of embassy prisoners on the day of Reagan's innauguration was merely a coincidence is too stupid to have the vote, especially in light of the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal. Anyone who thinks it a coincidence that George Bush Sr was elected Vice President within three years of running the CIA and apologizing for its excesses is too stupid to live.
Through the 80s, under William Casey at the CIA, the secret aristocracy ran the illegal Contra Wars through their increasingly well-coordinated network of CIA fronts (like Southern Air), private militias (like the notorious Miami Cuban soldiers of fortune), massive drug sales, and ties to Israeli intelligence all over Latin America. They also built from scratch a network of Islamic fundamentalists to attack the Soviets in Iraq, ironically doing heavy fundraising among fundamentalist Christian anti-Commuist groups in America.
But, all of this far away activity was really just covering fire for the assault on American democracy. These wars provided patriotic cover and wedge issues for the increasingly well-funded conservative propaganda organs to paralyze any investigation of the increasingly outside-the-law acitvities of the secret aristocracy's criminal hirelings. The 80s witnessed the neutering of the liberal press, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the beginnings of a media consolidation even more extreme than that documented in the 1980 classic "The Media Monopoly", and the subverting of the Democratic party by the corporate apparatchiks of the so-called Democratic Leadership Council.
In the 90s, the aristocratic program was seemingly derailed by Bill Clinton (the only genuinely popular candidate the DLC has ever fielded in the twenty years of its corporate sponsorship). But, in reality, the assault on democracy continued to gather speed. Clinton got away with postponing another Great Depression (which will soon land on us) by actually daring to tax the rich, balance the budget, and raise the minimum wage. He got away with it because he had the good luck to be in charge as the Internet bubble and the beginnings of corporate off-shoring put fantastic profits into the pockets of the secret aristocracy. As long as the economy held, Clinton and the sane aristocrats managed to bail the water out of America's financial bilges. But, he did nothing to restart the engines of democracy. Instead, he threw the lifeboats overboard. He signed GATT and NAFTA, effectively giving away self-government to faceless aristos in Switzerland. He continued to spend Cold War levels of cash on a military without a mission, unless you count preparing for the looming aristocratic/theocratic coup as a mission.
But worst of all for democracy, Clinton allowed the conservative grip on the media to tighten. He gave away tens of billions of dollars of free airwaves to TV broadcasters for HDTV without extracting any concessions in the way of fairness or community service. He rewrote the Telecommunications law in ways that allowed Cable monopolies to continue to twist programming to suit their self-declared anti-liberal owners, such as the ruthless John Malone and the big-table player Ruppert Murdoch. And, he allowed himself to be tortured by the Richard Mellon Scaife-fueled Ken Starr Inquisition. Ken Starr was a walking, talking recruiting poster for the kind of guilty-until-proven-innocent legal system that the aristos intend to impose. It brought the Stalinist show trial home to America, where it hadn't played since Joe McCarthy.
By 2000, the secret aristos had won. They owned the press, which printed lies and slanders against Democrats, failed to report on massive GOP corruption, had complete amnesia about Bush's NG record and the impeachment wringer the GOP fire-eaters had put the nation through for nothing.The aristos had also totally perverted a large segment of so-called Christian voters by illegal partisan activity. And, in a new twist, they controlled the new electronic voting machine companies, whose suspicious behavior along with the even more suspicious "failure" of exit polling was completely whitewashed until just before 911, whence it was permanently deep-sixed.
So, what is the bottom line for democracies that want to stay democracies?
....1) Term limits for covert intelligence agencies. ........Keep the records. Fire everyone after no more than ten years. Hire in the top administrators under the ........most stringent of surveillance. Set up another intelligence agency to keep track of the term-limited for the ........rest of their lives. Secrecy is the enemy of democracy. Secret wars will inevitably blowback against those ........who start them. (See Algeria, Afghanistan, Nicaragua.)
....2) Absolute caps on media concentration. ........Otherwise, there is a Silivio Berlusconi in your future, and soon after that, a foreign-engineered seizure ........of power. In this day of self-publishing on the Internet, media concentration makes absolutely no ........sense to writers and readers, only to corporations.
....3) Proportional Representation ........Since coup plotters use every aspect of the target society against it, we must recognize that the antiquated, ........gerrymandered, winner-take-all voter system of the US is one of the easiest locks for political thieves to ........pick. The GOP have less than 50% of the vote, and yet the Democrats have absolutely zero leverage ........over any legislation, any executive action, and any judicial appointment. The spineless cowards running ........the Democratic Party could certainly do better; but the institutional obsolescence of American voting ........laws are an invitation to manipulation.
....4) Government-financed elections, media time in proportion to previous vote totals ........These laws are in effect in Europe, and they are the best that can be done in the face of the de-politicization ........and low turnout engendered by the force-feeding of celebrity, sport, and consumption as the only uses ........of one's leisure time in a corporate-dominated society.
....5) Election machines in government hands with open software and paper trails ........Nuff said.
....6) Absolute separation of Church and State, including taxing Churches as normal businesses ........Again, Europe leads the way, under the buzzword "secularization", a word which has already been pre-emptively ........demonized in the U.S. The covert operatives have done a masterful job of hiding their coup inside of ........authoritarian religious organizations that are exempt from many important laws. Then they carefully ........expanded the de facto definition of what was "non-political" activity until the Southern Baptist Convention ........began to resemble the Ho Chi Mihn trail.
Well, so much for fantasy. None of this is going to happen in a country that is happily dismantling its science establishment, shipping its manufacturing base overseas, and gleefully bankrupting itself. Maybe in my next incarnation.
In case you don't understand reality yet, Dick Cheney is not on the ropes. Dick Cheney is winning. He is publicly declaring that he is above the law in every way, from the personal to the international. And no one has laid a glove on him. The opposition is fucking useless. The media are fucking traitors. I just want to scream.
Leonard Cohen said it better than I could ever scream it:
....Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. ....Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. ....Everybody knows the war is over. ....Everybody knows the good guys lost. ....Everybody knows the fight was fixed: ....the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. ....That's how it goes. Everybody knows.
....Everybody knows that the boat is leaking. ....Everybody knows that the captain lied. ....Everybody got this broken feeling like their ....father or their dog just died. ....Everybody talking to their pockets. ....Everybody wants a box of chocolates ....and a long stemmed rose. Everybody knows.
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