Two articles caught my attention today
From Alternet, on Why the Mad Rush to the '08 Elections?
It's a long article, but worth reading. Posted below, is a portion of the article:
link
"Perhaps the better question, then, is: Will the presidential election of 2008 turn out to be a turning-point election of historic proportions. The greatest unknown is whether or not the status quo is headed for a breakdown crisis severe enough to clear the ground for such a transformative moment.
Signs certainly point in that direction. The convergence of imperial defeat, economic insecurity, and rampant corporate malfeasance might be enough all by themselves. But the sudden change in the political status of global warming -- once the dim, background hum of some far distant disturbance, now more like the heart-stopping premonitory theme music from the soundtrack of Jaws -- magnifies the crisis of the whole global order, at home and abroad. Anatole Lieven has called it global capitalism's "existential challenge." Life as we've known it may be beginning to end. Congress is already holding hearings about the natural apocalypse to come, and all but the most ostrich-like politicians acknowledge global warming as an urgent reality; a fact-on-the-ground, so to speak, no longer a debatable theory.
The Bush administration -- and so the old order -- has staked a lot on Iraq, not just its geopolitical and global economic ambitions. Its already severely diminished status as a moral exemplar of democracy and civil liberties won't survive this latest plunge into military mayhem.
Moreover, the President's "surge" plan is a mortal threat to the secret source of the regime's strength at home. The politics of fear and imperial bravado, which once won it legions of followers, may, in the aftermath of the surge, reach its own turning point as those voters abandon ship as fast as they once climbed aboard. Can the administration or the old order survive a fiasco of such proportions?
Iraq is also the equivalent of a budgetary bunker-busting nuclear device. It exacerbates an already aggravated economic dilemma. Despite a Noah's flood of statistics that seem to support a Pollyana-ish view that we live today in the best of economic good times, millions of Americans experience the opposite -- a yawning gulf of insecurity affecting their health, retirement, and employment prospects. They share a gloomy sense of moving backwards, of decline.
Once upon a time, poverty was associated with the super-exploitation of those who toiled for meager reward. Then, in mid-twentieth century America, poverty came to be associated with the lack of work, with those so marginalized they were shut-out of the main avenues of modern commerce and industry. Nowadays, we are rushing back to the nineteenth century. Today, 30 million people in the United States work long and hard and still live in poverty.
Insecurity even more pervasive than this once supplied the energy responsible for supplanting laissez-faire capitalism with the New Deal. Might we be approaching something of that scale and scope today? Though there can be no definitive answer to this, there also can be no question that a general crisis of economic insecurity confronts the old order. All of its self-serving and adventitious rhetoric about the heroics of risk fall on increasingly deaf ears.
Not incidentally, since we live in the age of the global sweatshop, that older order is now global in scope; and the international financial mechanisms that so far have kept the global system humming for the U.S. are themselves under great and increasing strain. The system is, at present, being kept aloft by the needs of China, Japan, and other major economic powers. One day soon they may find the burden of swallowing gargantuan amounts of U.S. debt insupportable.
Are we heading toward a breakdown like the one which, in the early 1970s, forced the Nixon administration to scrap the Bretton Woods financial system, the defining economic institution of the post-war Pax Americana? Together with defeat in Vietnam, the devaluation of the dollar, and the end of fixed exchange rates for international currencies exacerbated the general impasse in which the New Deal order then found itself.
When it comes to the social reputation of our corporate elite, is it necessary to say anything more than Enron? The litany of shameless profiteering, felonious behavior, cronyism, and corruption at the apex of the private economy has arguably called into question the "right to rule" of those presiding over the country's key economic institutions. Even at the regime's hubristic height following Bush's presidential victory in 2004, he discovered he'd crossed a bridge too far in his attempt to turn over the Social Security System to Wall Street. Trust in the corporate elite has only grown frailer since then. Cynicism mixed with rage is a potentially explosive brew that fuels the economic populism even someone as "establishment" as James Webb articulated in his alternate State of the Union Address.
What may make these converging dilemmas over-ripe for change is the response of the old order itself. One sign that some decisive crisis has arrived is the growing incapacity of those in charge to adapt -- as if the dire nature of what's happening dries up the springs of their political imaginations, forcing them to fall back on brittle orthodoxies. Andrew Mellon's notion of liquidating everything in sight as a way out of the Great Depression was one case of mental paralysis, a retreat to what had once "worked"; after all, the periodic busts endemic to the laissez-faire capitalist life-cycle had, in the past, always cured themselves, even if the "cure" included a great deal of what we would today call "collateral damage." The Bush administration is similarly falling back on its own orthodoxies, each move only betraying just how out of touch its top officials are with the new political and social realities forming around them.
Take its reaction to the stunning electoral defeat it suffered last November. The President's new "surge" plan, the self-destructive decision to forge ahead in Iraq without a scintilla of reasonable hope of success, even from the standpoint of the most cynical imperialist, is such a reaction: instinctive, unreflective, inflexible, and probably deeply believed in. In other words, there is a resort to the ideological fixations which have long-driven this regime -- and the larger political order from which it rose - but which only become ever more rigidified as reality bites back.
So, for another example, the administration's response to the crisis of economic insecurity has amounted to an ideological provocation shoved right in the teeth of its own electoral repudiation. Bush proposed a massive cut in Medicare and Medicaid and, even more in-your-face than that, a tax on the health insurance of those dwindling remnants of the New Deal order who still enjoy some decent level of employer-funded health care.
Everything the old regime can imagine to defend itself ends up making things worse. With some poetic license, one is reminded of an inversion of that old Marxist axiom in which the capitalists, not the proletariat, become the gravediggers of capitalism.
The open door
Of course, that is a gross exaggeration. The question of the moment is not: Will 2008 be a turning-point election, but rather can it be one? Here, everything depends not on what the old order does on its own behalf, no matter how bone-headed, but on how the gathering forces of opposition respond to the system's crisis. Is there a willingness to build a clear, programmatic alternative inside the Democratic Party? It is, after all, an institution deeply infected with free market/free trade ideology and most of the imperial presumptions of the conservative counter-revolution.
Is there a readiness to mobilize around non-market solutions to the general crisis: To fight openly for the re-regulation of the economy and its planned re-industrialization; for its re-unionization; for redistributive policies to supplant the idée fixe of economic growth; for the dismantling of the petro-industrial complex and its replacement by a new, non-fossil-fuel system of energy production; for a global assault on the global sweatshop?
Will there be a new era of polarization rather than centrism, partisanship rather than bi-partisanship, a head-on confrontation with the Democratic Leadership Council, like the guerilla wars once waged against the John Jacob Raskob and Al Smith elite of the pre-New Deal Democratic Party or the one waged by the Goldwater legions against the silk-stocking Rockefeller Republicans? Once upon a time, someone as mild-mannered as Franklin Delano Roosevelt found it within himself to "welcome the hatred" of those he labeled "economic royalists." Might there be someone equally unafraid waiting in the wings today?
Is there a new order being born, ready to challenge the old one where it is both weakest and also strongest: namely, in the imperial arena? Not only has global aggression proved deadly to all, depraved in its moral consequences, and life-threatening to basic democratic principles and institutions at home, but it has also been the most fruitful, life-giving incubator of the conservative cultural populism which the old order has relied on for a generation. Anti-World War I intellectual Randolph Bourne's prophetic aperçu -- "War is the health of the State" -- needs to be made even more embracing: War has become the health of a whole political culture, not to mention the vast, hard-wired military-industrial apparatus with which it lives in symbiotic bliss. Is there a will to take on that system of cherished phobias, delusional consolations, and implacable interests?
Finally, there is the X factor, most unknowable of all, but also most critical in converting a mere election into something more transformative. Might a social movement or movements emerge from outside the boundaries of conventional politics, catalytic enough to fundamentally alter the prevailing metabolism of political life? Might the mass demonstrations of immigrants portend something of that kind? Might the anti-war movement soon enter a period of more sustained and varied opposition in the face of this administration's barbaric obtuseness? Straws in the wind as we race toward 2008."
Second, is an article in GQ magazine,The People V. Richard Cheney. This article is very thorough, and well written. IMHO, this should also apply to the President.
THE PEOPLE V. RICHARD CHENEY Link
"ARTICLE I
In his conduct of the office of the vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, contrary to his oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws of this nation be upheld, has deliberately obstructed the nation’s intelligence-gathering capacity...
ARTICLE II
Using the powers of the office of the vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, contrary to his oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws of this nation be upheld, has personally deceived the American people...
ARTICLE III
In his conduct of the office of the vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, contrary to his oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws of this nation be upheld, has deliberately embraced and sheltered a known criminal, to the great detriment of American policy.."
The GQ piece explains their reasoning and gives evidence for each article of impeachment. There are a total of 6 articles of impeachment. Again, I suggest you take the time to read this.
It's a long article, but worth reading. Posted below, is a portion of the article:
link
"Perhaps the better question, then, is: Will the presidential election of 2008 turn out to be a turning-point election of historic proportions. The greatest unknown is whether or not the status quo is headed for a breakdown crisis severe enough to clear the ground for such a transformative moment.
Signs certainly point in that direction. The convergence of imperial defeat, economic insecurity, and rampant corporate malfeasance might be enough all by themselves. But the sudden change in the political status of global warming -- once the dim, background hum of some far distant disturbance, now more like the heart-stopping premonitory theme music from the soundtrack of Jaws -- magnifies the crisis of the whole global order, at home and abroad. Anatole Lieven has called it global capitalism's "existential challenge." Life as we've known it may be beginning to end. Congress is already holding hearings about the natural apocalypse to come, and all but the most ostrich-like politicians acknowledge global warming as an urgent reality; a fact-on-the-ground, so to speak, no longer a debatable theory.
The Bush administration -- and so the old order -- has staked a lot on Iraq, not just its geopolitical and global economic ambitions. Its already severely diminished status as a moral exemplar of democracy and civil liberties won't survive this latest plunge into military mayhem.
Moreover, the President's "surge" plan is a mortal threat to the secret source of the regime's strength at home. The politics of fear and imperial bravado, which once won it legions of followers, may, in the aftermath of the surge, reach its own turning point as those voters abandon ship as fast as they once climbed aboard. Can the administration or the old order survive a fiasco of such proportions?
Iraq is also the equivalent of a budgetary bunker-busting nuclear device. It exacerbates an already aggravated economic dilemma. Despite a Noah's flood of statistics that seem to support a Pollyana-ish view that we live today in the best of economic good times, millions of Americans experience the opposite -- a yawning gulf of insecurity affecting their health, retirement, and employment prospects. They share a gloomy sense of moving backwards, of decline.
Once upon a time, poverty was associated with the super-exploitation of those who toiled for meager reward. Then, in mid-twentieth century America, poverty came to be associated with the lack of work, with those so marginalized they were shut-out of the main avenues of modern commerce and industry. Nowadays, we are rushing back to the nineteenth century. Today, 30 million people in the United States work long and hard and still live in poverty.
Insecurity even more pervasive than this once supplied the energy responsible for supplanting laissez-faire capitalism with the New Deal. Might we be approaching something of that scale and scope today? Though there can be no definitive answer to this, there also can be no question that a general crisis of economic insecurity confronts the old order. All of its self-serving and adventitious rhetoric about the heroics of risk fall on increasingly deaf ears.
Not incidentally, since we live in the age of the global sweatshop, that older order is now global in scope; and the international financial mechanisms that so far have kept the global system humming for the U.S. are themselves under great and increasing strain. The system is, at present, being kept aloft by the needs of China, Japan, and other major economic powers. One day soon they may find the burden of swallowing gargantuan amounts of U.S. debt insupportable.
Are we heading toward a breakdown like the one which, in the early 1970s, forced the Nixon administration to scrap the Bretton Woods financial system, the defining economic institution of the post-war Pax Americana? Together with defeat in Vietnam, the devaluation of the dollar, and the end of fixed exchange rates for international currencies exacerbated the general impasse in which the New Deal order then found itself.
When it comes to the social reputation of our corporate elite, is it necessary to say anything more than Enron? The litany of shameless profiteering, felonious behavior, cronyism, and corruption at the apex of the private economy has arguably called into question the "right to rule" of those presiding over the country's key economic institutions. Even at the regime's hubristic height following Bush's presidential victory in 2004, he discovered he'd crossed a bridge too far in his attempt to turn over the Social Security System to Wall Street. Trust in the corporate elite has only grown frailer since then. Cynicism mixed with rage is a potentially explosive brew that fuels the economic populism even someone as "establishment" as James Webb articulated in his alternate State of the Union Address.
What may make these converging dilemmas over-ripe for change is the response of the old order itself. One sign that some decisive crisis has arrived is the growing incapacity of those in charge to adapt -- as if the dire nature of what's happening dries up the springs of their political imaginations, forcing them to fall back on brittle orthodoxies. Andrew Mellon's notion of liquidating everything in sight as a way out of the Great Depression was one case of mental paralysis, a retreat to what had once "worked"; after all, the periodic busts endemic to the laissez-faire capitalist life-cycle had, in the past, always cured themselves, even if the "cure" included a great deal of what we would today call "collateral damage." The Bush administration is similarly falling back on its own orthodoxies, each move only betraying just how out of touch its top officials are with the new political and social realities forming around them.
Take its reaction to the stunning electoral defeat it suffered last November. The President's new "surge" plan, the self-destructive decision to forge ahead in Iraq without a scintilla of reasonable hope of success, even from the standpoint of the most cynical imperialist, is such a reaction: instinctive, unreflective, inflexible, and probably deeply believed in. In other words, there is a resort to the ideological fixations which have long-driven this regime -- and the larger political order from which it rose - but which only become ever more rigidified as reality bites back.
So, for another example, the administration's response to the crisis of economic insecurity has amounted to an ideological provocation shoved right in the teeth of its own electoral repudiation. Bush proposed a massive cut in Medicare and Medicaid and, even more in-your-face than that, a tax on the health insurance of those dwindling remnants of the New Deal order who still enjoy some decent level of employer-funded health care.
Everything the old regime can imagine to defend itself ends up making things worse. With some poetic license, one is reminded of an inversion of that old Marxist axiom in which the capitalists, not the proletariat, become the gravediggers of capitalism.
The open door
Of course, that is a gross exaggeration. The question of the moment is not: Will 2008 be a turning-point election, but rather can it be one? Here, everything depends not on what the old order does on its own behalf, no matter how bone-headed, but on how the gathering forces of opposition respond to the system's crisis. Is there a willingness to build a clear, programmatic alternative inside the Democratic Party? It is, after all, an institution deeply infected with free market/free trade ideology and most of the imperial presumptions of the conservative counter-revolution.
Is there a readiness to mobilize around non-market solutions to the general crisis: To fight openly for the re-regulation of the economy and its planned re-industrialization; for its re-unionization; for redistributive policies to supplant the idée fixe of economic growth; for the dismantling of the petro-industrial complex and its replacement by a new, non-fossil-fuel system of energy production; for a global assault on the global sweatshop?
Will there be a new era of polarization rather than centrism, partisanship rather than bi-partisanship, a head-on confrontation with the Democratic Leadership Council, like the guerilla wars once waged against the John Jacob Raskob and Al Smith elite of the pre-New Deal Democratic Party or the one waged by the Goldwater legions against the silk-stocking Rockefeller Republicans? Once upon a time, someone as mild-mannered as Franklin Delano Roosevelt found it within himself to "welcome the hatred" of those he labeled "economic royalists." Might there be someone equally unafraid waiting in the wings today?
Is there a new order being born, ready to challenge the old one where it is both weakest and also strongest: namely, in the imperial arena? Not only has global aggression proved deadly to all, depraved in its moral consequences, and life-threatening to basic democratic principles and institutions at home, but it has also been the most fruitful, life-giving incubator of the conservative cultural populism which the old order has relied on for a generation. Anti-World War I intellectual Randolph Bourne's prophetic aperçu -- "War is the health of the State" -- needs to be made even more embracing: War has become the health of a whole political culture, not to mention the vast, hard-wired military-industrial apparatus with which it lives in symbiotic bliss. Is there a will to take on that system of cherished phobias, delusional consolations, and implacable interests?
Finally, there is the X factor, most unknowable of all, but also most critical in converting a mere election into something more transformative. Might a social movement or movements emerge from outside the boundaries of conventional politics, catalytic enough to fundamentally alter the prevailing metabolism of political life? Might the mass demonstrations of immigrants portend something of that kind? Might the anti-war movement soon enter a period of more sustained and varied opposition in the face of this administration's barbaric obtuseness? Straws in the wind as we race toward 2008."
Second, is an article in GQ magazine,The People V. Richard Cheney. This article is very thorough, and well written. IMHO, this should also apply to the President.
THE PEOPLE V. RICHARD CHENEY Link
"ARTICLE I
In his conduct of the office of the vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, contrary to his oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws of this nation be upheld, has deliberately obstructed the nation’s intelligence-gathering capacity...
ARTICLE II
Using the powers of the office of the vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, contrary to his oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws of this nation be upheld, has personally deceived the American people...
ARTICLE III
In his conduct of the office of the vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, contrary to his oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws of this nation be upheld, has deliberately embraced and sheltered a known criminal, to the great detriment of American policy.."
The GQ piece explains their reasoning and gives evidence for each article of impeachment. There are a total of 6 articles of impeachment. Again, I suggest you take the time to read this.
posted by progressivegrannie at 10:07 AM
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