The US is Becoming a Failed State [Bush&Co destroying gov't, middle class

[Vitruvius]

<snip> the strategic objective of those who would “Starve the Beast” –is to poison the fiscal well with deficits and tax cuts until the federal government cannot deliver popularly desired political goods such as health care, much less help the states and cities provide basic services. Corporations then step into the void – or as much of the needs-market as is profitable – to sell vital services.

We are witnessing the domestic version of a phenomenon well known in the Third World: the deliberate creation of “failed states,” national governments that have been maneuvered or coerced into impotence by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, trade agreements with the United States – any combination of capital and military coercion. These states have become irrelevant to the needs of their own people and, therefore, in a very real sense, illegitimate. As Henry C..K. Liu explains, such states cannot deliver the goods: “Failed states provide only substandard political goods, if any at all. Weak failed states involuntarily forfeit, and strong failed states do so voluntarily, the responsibility for delivering political goods, and leave it to non-state actors, i.e. the private sector through the market mechanism. Privatization of the public sector is more than the outsourcing of state functions. It is the selling off of state prerogatives.”

The Bush regime has summoned the failed state chicken home to roost, with a vengeance, as it attempts to strip away every social obligation of the state to the people. <SNIP> Social Security – a public prize too fabulously rich to destroy, outright – is to be milked dry by Wall Street under one or another of the privatizing proposals floating around Republican and Democratic Leadership Council circles. <SNIP> Once entrenched in the system, it will be near-impossible to disentangle corporations from Social Security without trillions of dollars in indemnification by the federal treasury against corporate “losses.” This is part of how the public sphere is swallowed whole and irrevocably. Don’t write your congressperson, after-the-fact. She won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.

"Another political good", writes Liu, "is the provision of universal health care and education, the maintenance of a vibrant economy of full employment at living wages that will allow workers to afford decent housing and secure retirement, and a clean environment, without which all rhetoric about liberty becomes irrelevant." Even the coercive organs of the state – prisons, policing, the military – pass rapidly into private hands, evidence of advanced state failure. And no one should doubt that the American Gulag, comprising one quarter of the world’s prison inmates, half of them Black, is prima facie proof of massive state failure – a government that delivers incarceration, rather than liberty, to a huge portion of its citizens.

Much, much more at http://www.blackcommentator.com/131/131_cover_failed_pf.html

[scarletlib]

1. The Black Commentator is awesome

love his stuff

[FormerDittoHead]

2. I'm trying to tell you guys...

I know I'm a broken record but the whole thing makes sense when you realize that the "big" agenda underneath almost EVERYTHING they're doing is to screw things up bad enough to force us to accept a national sales tax.

"EVERYTHING" will be solved by a "fair", "flat" national sales tax.

That's their BIG agenda - by itself, it will reverse EVERYTHING the democrats have done (economically - they couldn't care less about social changes in spite of what they sell to the red states). It's the most regressive type of tax outside of a head tax, and in one step puts the overwealming burden of paying for government on the classes not living off of wealth.

[tofubo]

4. did ya ever hear of the

0.029% flat transaction tax (not 2.9%, point oh two nine percent) on all bank transactions ??
someone added up all the bank transfers and saw how much we took in in income tax, divided it up into the transfer number, and came up with .029% on all transactions (deposits, sales, etc...) that could replace the income tax

[Eloriel]

6. Boy are YOU going to be surprised

Man, I so wish you were right and what you envision was the worst they had in store for us.

Try instead: fascist totalitarian state masquerading as a democracy, if a limp one.

[Nay]

3. Awesome essay. This site is almost always right on target.

It must kill The Black Commentator that some black preachers and leaders are being bought off. It kills me, and I'm not even black. But one thing you used to be able to count on with black people is that they did not forget what happened to them 100 years ago and 50 years ago -- they knew who the bad guys were, and they didn't give them the time of day. I guess that couldn't last forever.

This essay points out another aspect of the whole "Starve the Beast" idea of the neocons -- that it is just a form of politics that has been used before -- only then it was called the "failed state." We were used to seeing them in Africa and Asia, where the dictatorial rulers would rape and steal from the whole populace to enrich himself, and then run off to the south of France to lounge around with his pile of stolen money. Now, here, we have a tiny class of people doing the same thing to us. We are all still stunned that this could happen at all to us, and most of us don't want to believe it is happening. Once you are in the grip of madmen, it is very hard to shake yourself loose -- they are very crazy, and very powerful.

[Vitruvius]

5. On the bright side, Bu$h & Co. may not be able to run off to the south of

France or anywhere else after raping & stealing the US blind and killing & looting their way thru Iraq; they've angered the entire civilized world.

We may yet see the Bush gang on trial in the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.