IT’S HAPPENING HERE (2012-01-13)
I. Background
The great novelist Upton Sinclair wrote the Novel It Can’t Happen Here in response to the rise of Nazism in Germany. More recently a novel with the similar title: It can happen here was written during the alarming assault on our civil liberties during the early days of the Bush administration after 911.
During the 2008 election campaign many projected onto Obama their hopes and aspirations and assumed that when he assumed power he would reverse the worst policies of the hideous George W. Bush administration. Obama was highly articulate, well read, thoughtful and highly intelligent human and seemingly progressive human being who was intellectually head and shoulders above the light weight George W. Bush. During the campaign Obama skillfully let his followers read his tea leaves with his supporters reading into his lofty rhetoric everything they wanted him to be. So successful was his campaign that he won the Advertising Association of America’s award for the best advertising campaign of the year. The promise was that this professor or constitutional law would reverse the worse excesses of the Bush years by executive order as he promised.
Obama inherited two wars and an economy in free fall. The TARP bailout occurred before he even was inaugurated. While on the one hand he abolished torture he also preserved the right to render citizens to other countries for torture by proxy. He has declared the right to assassinate Americans accused of supporting terrorists abroad without due process. He has made the Afghanistan war his own and has launched many more Drone attacks than George W. Bush ever did.
So although Obama is infinitely more sophisticated, many of the Bush policies remain. And, as Allan Nairn concludes, the American Killing Machine remains on course.
All this brings up the issue of how America Society works. Jointly we believe in Liberty and Democracy.
We collectively agree that everything America does is for the good of others. As Nixon said, if the president does it is legal. If America does it is legal and justified. This is American exceptionalism.
So this is what Andrew Bacevich talks about in the book Washington Rules. About the Credo that the world should follow the will of the US, and the trinity that we should use our military to affect this to project force wherever we had interests, and to use our military to enforce our will if our vital interests were threatened Obama despite his high intelligence has accepted this paradigm and is a trapped in accepting this just as all other recent presidents.
Stephen Daedelus in Joyce’s book Ulysses states that “history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” This is certainly true of all of American history going back to the beginning. We were a nation founded on genocide; nurtured on slavery and that after WWII have been involved in the deaths our millions of people in the name of freedom. We have established an Empire of Military Bases around the world that is unprecedented in history. Greater than the Romans, Spanish, the Dutch or the English. An empire based on Military Bases strategically placed to control natural resources and for rapid deployment to hotspots. We have never met a dictator (preferably military) that we would not support as long as they facilitated our interests. After WWII we skillfully manipulated the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF as implements of US foreign policy using debt as a weapon to obtain resources at bargain basement prices for our corporations.
What do we mean by protecting America’s interests? Whose interests? Yours? Mine? No, we mean the myriad corporations that operate being the scenes. Who donate the money to congress so that US treasury funds provided compliments of the American Taxpayer can be used to provide those bases and support that further their bottoms lines.
The books by Jon Perkins thoroughly document the role of Economic Hit Men from large corporations building infrastructure projects in third world countries in subverting those countries interests by created indebtedness—or in assassinations by “jackals” for leaders not complying with the programs. Starting from the beginning with our internal colonialism (no overseas conquest, but conquest none the less); with the conquest of Mexico we continued the process. However with 1898 and the Spanish American war with the conquest of Cuba, the Caribbean, and the theft of Hawaii and with conquering of the Philippines could we consider our country a full-fledged Empire.
Recent books discuss the coming end of the American Empire. Both Johan Galtung (The End of the American Empire- and then what? And Professor Chalmers Johnson’s book Dismantling the American Empire. There is a natural history of empire—much like that of a disease—and empires rise, conquer and then fall—usually for the same two reasons: 1. They outsource their means of production and 2; they get involved in costly wars of conquest which eventually bankrupt them; both authors conclude that America is in the process of losing its empire. Galtung foresees the possibility of a golden age for America if it can rid itself of empire (or a fascistic dictatorship) if not. Chalmers Johnson feels that we can preserve our republic only if we get rid of our empire by abolishing the CIA and drastically cutting back our military expenditures…
These premises are surely true. The roughly 1000 bases around the world are incredibly expensive and earn us only animosity from the natives whose land we have expropriated, whose environments we have polluted (the US military is a major polluter) and whose citizens die in auto accidents caused by drunken soldiers or whose women are raped by soldiers who are than whisked away to the US and never subjected to any justice.
While bearing a great deal of responsibility for establishing The US Military-Industrial-Complex Eisenhower nevertheless warned us about its dangers. More recently the total information awareness program (TIA) program which was initially defunded only to rear its head in the NSA in a resurrected form has added another 850,000 people to what is becoming the Intelligence complex.
The technical capabilities of the Intelligence community are prodigious. According to Bamford in the Shadow Factory, NSA started diverting and saving the internet and telephone stream content illegally in 2006. In response to a class action law suit challenging warrant less wiretapping a spineless congress including many Democrats granted the providers retroactive immunity thus ending the suit.
So the process continues. Much of the information stored is inconsequential, but as they say the journey is its own reward. In this case the system effectively channels lucrative fees to contractors who collect analyze and warehouse the data. The amount of money spent by the Intelligence establishment is indeterminate as the numbers are buried in the defense budget. However, the Obama administration recently admitted to $70B. A recent Washington Post feature article (Top Secret America, Dana Priest) documented that 2000 corporations are involved at 1200 sites all around the country. Outsourcing America’s intelligence to corporations represents a great risk to America’s long term security.
This nation is in mortal danger of evolving into a totalitarian state. The various stages of the process have been laid out by Naomi Wolf and can be summarized as follows in the Essay Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot and reflect the founders of the fragility of democracy. The warnings are:
- Invoke external threats. 911 provided the catalyst.
- Establish secret prisons. ICE has imprisoned many in warehouses around the US out of any judicial overview.
- Develop paramilitary organizations
- Surveil ordinary citizens
- Infiltrate citizen groups
- Arbitrary detentions and release
- Target key individuals
- Restrict the press.
- Frame criticism as espionage and dissent as treason / disloyalty.
- Subvert the rule of law. Indeed recent events document that we live in a state of impunity. Leaders up to and including the president can violate international laws and torture. Bush basically claimed the right to imprison anyone at his whim; Obama has claimed the right to assassinate Americans abroad without due process if he believes the person has engaged in terrorist activity. Then, we have bankers who ripped off and destroyed our economy robbing many of their pensions and houses. Rather than being punished they received the $700B TARP bailout funds, but also (behind the scenes) up to $17 trillion in credit guarantees.
With the above in mind we see the progressive militarization of life in this country. We have militarized the borders. Our police departments have become militarized.
The FBI spends much time monitoring American citizens. The Patriot Act allowed any secret searches without court ordered subpoenas. The government is monitoring every phone call and internet transaction and warehousing the information. Big brother has arrived!
Thus, the “government” has access to information about everyone. But let’s define government. For the last 30 years government has been made the bogey man by the right wing. As Ronald Reagan said: government is not the solution, government is the problem. The right wing when in power has done everything in its power to dismantle social action programs and the regulatory agencies looking out after the peoples interests. They have systematically diverted public assets for their own benefit. E.g. lucrative oil, mineral and timber contracts which make them wealthy—using assets belonging to the American people. Government is not the senators and representatives in Washington but the campaign contributors from the many special interests that own them. Thus, the right wing vilifies government scheming at every turn to eliminate Medicare and privatize social security—so Wall Street can speculate with the funds—and does hide the billions in benefits they accrue from “government”.
Politicians have in the past used the power of government to attack their adversaries. J. Edgar Hoover kept files on anyone he could. He destroyed many careers. The saying was that presidents reported to J. Edgar Hoover and that J.Edgar Hoover reported to God. The abuse of power by the FBI has been well recognized—CointelPro involved the infiltration the peace and Black Panther movement s with the use of agent’s provocateurs. Nixon used many tricks against his enemies. Thus, he pulled their tax records. In the case of Daniel Ellsberg his operatives broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and also broke into the Watergate to obtain documents from the DNC.
But as of the moment we still have the trappings of democracy. We elected a Blackman to the presidency—a monumental accomplishment—no matter how one feels about his policies. This writing is examining the question of what would it take to truly form a dictatorship in this country. Wolin in Democracy Incorporated argues we have a stated of inverted totalitarianism where corporation serve the same function as a dictator.
In the thirties there was a conspiracy to overthrow FDR. Smedley Butler (War Is A racket) reported that operatives from the JP Morgan interests approached him to lead a coup against Roosevelt.
More recently we have in some ways we have already had a coup in this country. The intervention of the Supreme Court disrupting a process that constitutionally belonged with the states effectively let they select Bush. Exit pole date clearly had Kerry as the winner. Similarly, the 2004 Ohio election was marked by massive fraud and irregular computer transfers. This reflects the opinion of an internationally recognized computer expert. A suit was scheduled for Election Day 2004. The main witness, however, was killed in a small plane crash.
Dysfunctional senate rules requiring a supermajority of votes to pass any substantive legislation means that a few individuals can thwart the desires of the majority.
But the concern of this investigation goes beyond this. The question at hand is how could an individual or group of individuals take over the government, eliminate the opposition and control the entire country?
II. Posse Commitatus. This was effectively eliminated in the recently passed Defense Appropriation bill of January 20012.
1878 prevent Army from activity in the country
III. Mercenaries: Blackwater and Mercenary Armies
With the shift from the draft to an all volunteer army private contractors were used to fill in for the work done previously by draftees. Contracts were initially used to fill in for the menial duties done by soldiers. When Cheney and Rumsfeld launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq they massively increased the use of these entities. These contracting entities, particularly Blackwater. Blackwater was formed in 1997 by Erik Prince and quickly became a part of the war effort. The deaths of 4 Blackwater employees in Fallujah with the desecration of their bodies by the crowds lead to the massive attack on that town in retribution and lead to its virtual destruction. This inflamed the Iraqi opposition and massively increased the violence. Blackwater also was involved in the Nissar Square massacre. Blackwater CEO Eric Prince is a former navy seal and member of a family well known in right wing fundamental Christian circles. Eric Prince has obtained contracts worth billions during a short period and has essentially built his own private army with a 20,000 acre army base in North Carolina and several other bases. He has airplanes and has built a tank. (See Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill (VideoNation U-tube). Blackwater helps the US war effort. Their deaths are not counted in the war statistics. They are free agents not subject to the laws of the US or international law. Their war crimes have gone unpunished—see the Nissar square massacre. But, these operatives have made themselves indispensable and now guard members of the US embassy.
Blackwater is active in many countries. Blackwater operatives were employed in New Orleans during Katrina. And this is the most ominous aspect of these mercenary soldiers. For years there have been militia movements in this country. These consist of soldiers carrying resentments against the government who they hold to be the enemy. The recent oath takers movement involves persons who take an oath to disobey what they consider illegal orders. They represent a lunatic fringe. One recent plot involved killing policemen, then shooting up the mourners at the funerals. What this was going to accomplish is mystifying. The obvious fear is expressed in the elements of the oath: no giving up of arms; no incarcerating Americans charged with being enemy combatants, no blockade of cities. Etc.
In truth many of these people really hate Obama and would be the ones restricting others rights.
The second amendment has been distorted by the NRA and GOA. The NRA and gets its way; people who should not have guns are getting them at gun shows. Also, many guns are being run into Mexico and are fueling the narco wars. It is ironic but Ashcroft argued after 911 for the right of terrorists to purchase arms! Unbelievable.
Etc. To be continued.
Howard P. Charman, MD 01-13-2012