Friday, April 18, 2003

The Long Night of Empire Returns to Coarsen our Lives America is creating a new empire.  It is useless to pretend that our country believes in anything more than the rule of might. No matter how distressed we might be by leaders who turn out to be traitors to our democratic ideals, the fact is that a transformation has occurred.   The U.S. is no longer simply a powerful democratic country promoting its interests in the world.  It has become a domineering military power, using its military and economic might to reward or punish countries by whether they submit to or defy wishes of the U.S. generals and political radicals.   What does that mean to us?  I know that I have had privilege, but I used to believe that despite privilege, global integration made good sense for business and political reasons.  I felt myself a “citizen” of the world, by which I felt I was a member of the class who ran businesses, who moved around the world at will, who supported “good” causes.    There was a time in the 1990’s when I literally felt the entire world was open to me.  It was easy to visit Russia, to drop everything and get a plane to Germany on six hours notice, even with an expired passport.  I used to dash in and out of airports, and would think nothing of leaving Boston, scheduling a two-hour meeting in Dallas, and then following it up with dinner in San Francisco.  I felt the goals of the various companies I worked for were honorable, and that our deals were “win-win” contracts, beneficial to ourselves and our customers, and our customer’s customers.   In the midst of this, I began to feel like a global citizen.  I had friends in many countries—we all shared similar goals and outlooks, we all were family and business oriented—we felt part of a well functioning society.   I know that underneath this surface, there was much inequality, oppression, and poverty, and that in some sense, the riches I was living off of in a business and personal sense had come from some unequal distribution of power.  But I felt the trend was positive, that power was coming to be more and more shared, that there was an alternative to the fanaticism and religious fundamentalism that raged against all this modernity.   Now, I feel that we have changed.  Like the phase change that occurs when water changes to ice on the surface of a pond, suddenly our environment is totally new.  Our new environment is empire, with Americans no longer global citizens, but hated targets.   The New York Times today ran an article on how hundreds of American scholars and archeologists were forced to stop working across the entire Arab world because their safety was now at risk.   Experts say the war has caused the greatest interruption of overseas study since World War II, forcing the cancellation or postponement of hundreds of expeditions researching everything from Islamic law to the bone knives used by ancient butchers. "I can't remember when research has been disrupted across such a wide region," said Dr. Stone, who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "The war has left a very wide footprint." Many professors with long experience in the region fear it could be years before hostilities subside enough to allow researchers from the United States to operate overseas as they have in the past. "Only in the best case will conditions for research ever be as good as in the past," said Philip D. Gingerich, a University of Michigan paleontologist who has dug for ancient whale skeletons in Pakistan since the early 1970's. "Anti-American feelings have grown so strong in these populations that unquestionably it will now be more dangerous to work in many areas." This is only the tip of the iceberg.  As someone who often works in Canada, I have continually listened to colleagues ask why America has become so crazy and paranoid. When asked recently during an interview program on the BBC about whether America was chaging into an imperial power as opposed to a democracy, the expert said not to underestimate the power of American democracy to reject this empire. But, I think those outside the U.S. don’t realize the extent to which our democracy has been corrupted by a fascist nexus of money=power=money, where the function of government is to enrich the business groups that keep it in power, and the function of the business groups is to buy congressional and executive power.  Our democracy is no longer based on human equality and individual rights.  It is based on the purchase of votes and politicians by immensely wealthy backers. The gross change in income inequality of the country has set the stage for this new empire.  When business leaders make thousands of times what their workers do, a new powerful moneyed class is created that has the power to buy opinion, to buy elections, and to mould the courts to its perspective that money is pure speech. More importantly, their interests have nothing in common with the interests of the ordinary Americans. So the growth of inequality has set the stage for our country’s transition from democracy to empire. What follows is militarization, loss of democracy, huge expansion of imprisonment, passage of draconian laws against speech and assembly, all creating the kind of totalitarian entity necessary to run a global empire. Here are a couple of examples: --attempted passage of a draconian new bankruptcy law to strengthen credit card company's ability to profit at the expense of the poorest people in the country. --erosion of minimum wages to less than 60% of historic values. -- proposal to give the Government the power to strip Americans of their citizenship, and then the power to imprison them without review. Our “enemy” is often characterized as an Islamic religious fundamentalism that does not respect women’s rights or individual democratic liberties.  The imposition of Sharia law is cast as proof.  But we have become captured by our own zealots, with their own sharia law of money before rights. Our president had his fortune given to him by rich backers who wished to use their connections to gain governmental favors.  Once bought, he has reflected the total ideological interest of this power, which radically furthers income inequality and uses religion and moral language to mask totalitarian dreams of absolute power.  We have a long dark time ahead. 1:49:53 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 5/1/2003; 11:43:29 PM.