Center for a Stateless Society » U.S. empire

The Imperial Presidency Comes to Kaneohe Klipper’s 16th Hole

Gary Chartier — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 19:00:15 +0000

Partisan combatants have quickly taken up sides in the public debate over US president Barack Obama’s preemption of a wedding planned by two US Army captains at a course at which he wanted to golf.

Obama’s defenders stress that the White House was unaware of the planned wedding until after scheduling the president’s game. They emphasize that he apologized to the happy couple. And they note that those planning to use the course are alerted to the possibility that they might be booted to make room for POTUS.

Critics say the president is insensitive for evicting a wedding party. And in Obama’s decision to play at the expense of a military wedding they see more evidence of what they believe is his disrespect for the armed forces he is charged with commanding.

But notice what both sides seem to be accepting without question: What legendary Democratic historian Arthur Schlesinger called “the imperial presidency.” While presidents have always enjoyed considerable power and prestige, the presidency turns full imperial when, as is true today, the president is expected to oversee an expanding global military and economic empire, when the president is treated, not like an ordinary citizen but instead like a demigod.

Take a moment to think of the president as an ordinary American, with no special privileges or opportunities other than those directly required to allow her or him to perform the duties associated with the presidency. You don’t need a golf course to yourself in order to perform those duties. A president who was treated, legally and socially, as one of the people would be expected to share a golf course with everyone else.

But even if the president doesn’t deserve to be treated as socially superior to everyone else, don’t we all benefit if the president is protected from attack by an enormous security bubble? It’s not obvious that we do. Presidents can be effectively protected while they’re still treated like ordinary people. And, while no one ought to be the victim of aggressive violence, and it makes sense to take precautions against assassination attempts, presidents aren’t so important that their interests trump everyone else’s. Bluntly put, if the president is out of action for one reason or another, the sky won’t fall.

Even if you think it’s really necessary for the president to operate within an absurdly large security bubble, why think that she or he should get to use that bubble to exclude ordinary people going about their business? Believers in the bubble might insist that the president could demand an oversized protective zone when engaged in official business. But why imagine that the bubble could be put in place to allow the president to socialize or to engage in recreation or fundraising?

And it’s worth emphasizing that the imperial presidency makes violence against the president more likely. The more power presidents exercise over people’s lives, at home and abroad, the more people may resent the way that power is used, and sometimes seek to respond with violence. That kind of violence isn’t OK; but that it’s not doesn’t change the fact that treating presidents like emperors raises the odds that they’ll be targets for would-be assassins.

The problem with Obama’s golf course preemption isn’t a problem unique to Obama. And it doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with respect for the military. The problem is the imperial presidency. As long as we’ve got an emperor, we shouldn’t be surprised if he acts imperial.

How the Soviet Union Won the Cold War

Kevin Carson — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:00:08 +0000

I don’t know when this column will see print, but as I write it people all over the world are celebrating — with rightful enthusiasm — the fall of the Iron Curtain 25 years ago. During the Spanish-American War, William Graham Sumner gave a speech on “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” in which he argued that despite having lost on the battlefield, Spain had actually triumphed because in the course of fighting that war the United States had remade itself as an imperialistic power in Spain’s image. The parallels to the fall of the Iron Curtain and Communism should be obvious.

Although the post-Soviet thaw in former Eastern Bloc countries was warped and perverted by neoliberal “disaster capitalism,” by the corporate enclosure of the former state economies, and by the incorporation of those countries into the global corporate system, the events of 1989-91 were still on the whole a great victory for the people of the Soviet Bloc. For the rest of the world, not so much.

However bloody and authoritarian the Soviet system of power was within the USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites — and it was very much so — when it came to external military aggression and subversion it was entirely in the shadow of the United States and the American bloc. As Noam Chomsky once said, the Cold War — as a first approximation — amounted to a war by the USSR against its satellites and by the US against the Third World.

There was also a direct superpower dynamic at work, but it was comparatively weak. The general outlines of the post-war order — the IMF and World Bank integrating national economies under the control of American corporate capital, and the US armed forces (under UN Security Council figleaf) operating as enforcer against any national defection from global corporate rule — functioned exactly as they had been designed to in US planning circles from 1944 on, as if the USSR had never existed.

The Soviet Union did indeed sometimes act as a spoiler outside its bloc, when it could aid a national liberation movement at relatively low risk to itself and increase the costs of Empire to the United States. And even the outside possibility of direct military confrontation with a nuclear superpower probably deterred some American actions on the margin (like an invasion of Iran or the introduction of ground troops in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War).

But on the whole the USSR was only a lacuna or blank space — labelled “Here Be Commies” — on the map of the neoliberal Pax Americana. Outside that encapsulated regional system of domination, America acted as the largest and most aggressive imperial power in human history, directly invading or subverting and overthrowing more governments than any empire that came before it. The “Black Book of Communism” is a bloody track record indeed. But the Black Book of American Imperialism would include the millions of deaths inflicted on Indochina after the US took over France’s role maintaining a landed oligarchy in power in Saigon, the hundreds of thousands (conservative estimate) killed by Suharto after the US-sponsored coup in Indonesia and the much larger death toll from Mobutu after the assassination of Lumumba, the countless deaths in Indonesia’s genocidal assault on East Timor, the hundreds of thousands or millions killed by Central American death squads since the overthrow of Arbenz, the victims tortured by military dictators in Brazil, Chile, and the other South American countries swept by Operation Condor, and the millions starved or bombed to death in Iraq since 1990.

The fall of the USSR as even a partial counterweight resulted in totally unrivalled and unchecked US domination in the quarter century since. In that time, not only has the US-backed global system of power consolidated and increased in authoritarianism, but American domestic authoritarianism has ratcheted upwards with it.

But even more important than the scale and aggressiveness of the American empire, compared to the Soviet one, is the nature of the society it serves. As with the Soviet Union and its satellites, the foreign policy of the US and its major allies serves the interests of a domestic system of class power.

The American corporate-state system of power, like the old Soviet bureaucratic state socialist, hinges on the control of information. In the Soviet bloc, this meant censoring the press and licensing the use of photocopiers to prevent the free flow of information that would challenge the regime’s framing of events or undermine its claims to legitimacy. In the American bloc, this means corporate control of the replication and distribution of information in order to extract profit from it.

Globally, this means that so-called “intellectual property” is central to the profit models of all the dominant sectors of the world corporate economy. Some of the most profitable sectors — entertainment and software — depend on the direct sale of proprietary information that could reproduced virtually free of charge. Others — drugs, electronics, genetically modified seeds — depend on patents on product designs or production processes. Others — virtually all offshored manufacturing — depends on the use of patents and trademarks to offshore actual production to Third World sweatshops while retaining a legal monopoly on the sole right to purchase and dispose of the product. These global corporate sectors would probably collapse without the draconian “intellectual property” standards being exported by the US in the form of “Free Trade Agreements” (which are obviously nothing of the kind).

Since the fall of the USSR the United States has acted aggressively not only to punish challenges to its status as hegemon (in Iraq and the Balkans), but has created a legal framework of treaties and statutes (NAFTA, the Uruguay Round of GATT, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and assorted “Free Trade Agreements” that essentially integrate most of the planet into its model of corporate capitalism).

Domestically, corporate power’s central reliance on information control has meant the use of DRM to make movies, music, and software uncopyable, the legal prohibition of developing or disseminating techniques for breaking DRM, and the increased use of lawless, extrajudicial powers like direct executive seizure of websites without charge or trial based on allegations of hosting “pirated” content. Joe Biden personally supervised — from Disney Headquarters! — a Justice Department task force that took down dozens of such websites in violation, in total violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Internet Service Providers have assumed the role of policing their own paying customers on behalf of the movie and music industry, discontinuing service based on uninvestigated complaints of infringement. The global trade agreements mentioned above are pushing worldwide adoption of the US’s harsh new “intellectual property” law.

Meanwhile, the domestic security state in the US — already mushrooming out of control with Drug War-related militarization of SWAT teams and Clinton’s 1996 Counter-Terrorism law — grew by further leaps and bounds after 9/11. The TSA airport screening infrastructure and its industrial contractors, NSA’s illegal telephone and Internet surveillance and the ISPs and social networks that cooperate with it, and the intersection with increasing police militarization with military-style suppression of protests like Occupy and Ferguson, have coalesced into a Security-Industrial Complex worth tens of billions of dollars and a law enforcement establishment operating almost totally outside the bounds of law.

So Western-style corporate capitalism, and the global economy legally integrated into it (with the ultimate backing of the US armed forces), amounts to a DRM Curtain.

Of course IP isn’t the only form of state authoritarianism involved in maintaining corporate rule. Another central purpose of US foreign policy is to uphold neocolonial control of land and natural resources throughout the Third World by transnational corporations. Western capital, in alliance with domestic ruling elites, perpetuates the original theft of those resources by European colonial empires. Going back to the Spanish and English in the New World and Warren Hastings in Bengal, these empires enclosed land and evicted peasants by the millions, converting their former holdings to cash crop agriculture. They seized mineral deposits and worked them with slave labor. The heirs to this robbery — the transnational mining and oil corporations, and native landed oligarchies in collusion with global agribusiness companies — continue to loot hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth from the Global South. And they rely on the US military and CIA to intervene when the people of those countries try to take back what is rightfully theirs (as with the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala).

Between the Drug War and the War on Terror (which are really a war on the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth amendments), and the current expansion of their enforcement and surveillance into the War on IP Piracy, the US has a brutal gulag system with a larger share of its population imprisoned than any other country except North Korea.

Perhaps most ironic, the American corporate economy is even challenging the old Soviet system in the one area that was its pride and joy — central planning and bureaucratic ossification. Since the rise of a stable corporate economy a century ago, with major manufacturing industries dominated by a handful of oligopoly firms, the large American corporation has been a centrally planned bureaucracy much like the old Soviet industrial ministries. They ignore or punish the people on the spot with actual knowledge of the situation, recklessly interfere with their judgement by diktat, irrationally misallocate billions in capital investment, and use an internal transfer pricing system about as divorced from reality as that of Gosplan. And since the neoliberal revolution and the rise of Cowboy Capitalism in the 80s, corporations have been taken over internally by a self-perpetuating oligarchy of self-dealing MBAs virtually indistinguishable from the Soviet nomenklatura. They are able to survive despite their gross inefficiency and corruption for the same reason the Soviet planned economy did for so long: they exist within a larger, statist system of power that protects them from outside competition.

So in place of the world of 25 years ago, with a really bad global superpower partially constrained by a really bad regional superpower enforcing centrally planned bureaucratic oligarchy on a portion of the Eurasian landmass, what we have today is a single, unconstrained really horrible global superpower enforcing centrally planned monopoly finance capitalism on the entire planet. In the place of an Iron Curtain across central Europe and the Korean peninsula policed by barbed wire and machine gun towers, we have a global Empire with a DRM Curtain policed by drones and carrier groups. The USSR is dead. Long live the USSR.

But I can’t leave it at that. This new system of power is no more inevitable, or even sustainable, than the one that collapsed twenty-five years ago. It does an even poorer job, in actual practice, of controlling information than the Soviet regime did. The Soviets learned that locking up photocopiers couldn’t stop the circulation of Samizdat literature, but their efforts to do so were a resounding success compared to how their American successors have fared against The Pirate Bay, Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks, Anonymous and Edward Snowden. The enforcement technologies that “intellectual property” depends on are being — have been — rapidly undermined by libertarian technologies of circumvention. Area denial technologies for challenging American military power projection are many times cheaper, and have an innovation cycle far more rapid, than American technologies for military aggression. The days of this Evil Empire, like the earlier one, are numbered.

Out of Iraq, Etc.!

Sheldon Richman — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 18:00:57 +0000

Nearly a century ago, after four bloody years of World War I, British colonialists created the state of Iraq, complete with their hand-picked monarch. Britain and France were authorized — or, more precisely, authorized themselves — to create states in the Arab world, despite the prior British promise of independence in return for the Arabs’ revolt against the Ottoman Turks, which helped the Allied powers defeat the Central powers. And so European countries drew lines in the sand without much regard for the societies they were constructing from disparate sectarian, tribal, and ethnic populations.

Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations declared that former colonies of the defeated powers “are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” These included the Arabs (and others) in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Levant (today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel). Because they were not ready for independence and self-government, the covenant stated, their “well-being and development” should be “entrusted to advanced nations who … can best undertake this responsibility.”

In other words, the losers’ colonies would become the winners’ colonies. British and French politicians would judge when the Arabs (and Kurds) were fit to govern themselves. Until then, they would remain under the loving care of enlightened Europeans. On the few occasions when Arabs failed to appreciate their good fortune and resisted, their benefactors had to punish them with tough love in the form of aerial bombardment and other means of modern warfare. It was for the natives’ own good, of course.

Or that’s had the imperialists told it. Only a cynic could believe that their economic and political interests lay behind this neocolonialist system.

We might keep this history in mind as we view with increasing horror what is taking place in the newly declared Islamic State (formerly ISIL or ISIS) in large parts of British- and French-created Iraq and Syria.

No one can say how the Middle East would have turned out if the Western powers had butted out after the Great War and let the Arabs, Kurds, and others find their own way in the modern world. But treating the indigenous populations like children cannot have advanced the cause of peaceful civilization.

It’s no exaggeration to say that virtually every current problem in the region stems at least in part from the imperial double cross and carve-up that took place after the war. And the immediate results of the European betrayal were then exacerbated by further acts of intervention and neocolonialism, most recently: President George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War and embargo on Iraq; President Bill Clinton’s continued embargo and bombing of Iraq; President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq and overthrow of the secular regime of Saddam Hussein (al-Qaeda, of which the Islamic State is an offshoot, was not in Iraq before this); President Barack Obama’s support (until recently) for the corrupt, autocratic Shi’ite government in Baghdad; and Obama’s throwing in with those seeking to oust secular Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which made that country a magnet for radical Sunni jihadis, the same who are now threatening genocide against Shi’ites, Christians, and Yazidis in Iraq. (Thus Obama’s policy is at war with itself.)

History alone does not tell us what, if anything, outside powers should do now; there’s no going back in time. But we can say that without foreign interference, even a violent evolution of the region might have been far less violent than it has been during the last century. At least, the violent factions would not be seeking revenge against Americans.

The rise of the brutal Islamic State, with its unspeakable violence against innocents, is an appalling but unsurprising outcome of the last 100 years, including seven decades of neocolonialist American intervention. This suggests that U.S. intervention at this stage will only come to grief by boosting anti-American jihadi recruitment and even encouraging the targeting of Americans at home. Wars never go as planned. After all this time, any so-called “humanitarian” intervention will be interpreted in imperialist terms — and should be.

The U.S. government must get out of Iraq (etc.). Intervention not only violates the rights of Americans; it is sure to exacerbate the violence in that pitiable region.

What Obama Says with His Bombs

Jason Lee Byas — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 18:00:48 +0000

On August 7th, President Obama announced his authorization of targeted strikes over Iraq in order to quell the ongoing Islamic State offensive. Just as important are the statements his administration has made through the actions that followed. The bombs actually started to fall on Friday, announcing without words that the US government’s policy of actively managing Iraqi affairs from afar is far from over.

This reminder is unsurprising. Throughout Iraq’s history, western powers have always stood over its shoulders, issuing their own demands for their own purposes. Ever since its birth, Iraq has been a prime example of why foreign interventions almost always create more problems than they solve.

For instance, the current chaos in Iraq is a direct result of the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Going further back, Saddam Hussein’s crimes were aided by a US government that sold him chemical weapons, which he then infamously used against the Kurds. In fact, much of the nation’s ethnic tensions can be blamed on the arbitrary borders drawn by the British after defeating the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

Obama assures us that he “will not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” acknowledging that “there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq.” Yet as his actions show, what counts as a solution will be determined by terms laid down by him and the government he represents.

Even if he keeps his word and does not issue another full-scale invasion, he still presumes the right to dictate Iraq’s future. Iraq is still the property of the United States.

A second unspoken message has been the disregard for whatever human life happens to be in the way of operations carried out by the United States military. Obama is right to condemn the truly horrifying crimes committed by ISIL in the harshest terms possible. Even so, this is not an excuse for his administration to begin slaughtering innocents on its own through the inevitable collateral damage.

No matter how precisely “targeted” these strikes really are, completely innocent people will be a part of the body count. Of course, those deaths come as a regretted, unintentional, undesired side-effect of the strikes, which are aimed at ISIL combatants. However, because modern warfare is such that these deaths will not be of an insubstantial number, and because they can be predicted to happen with near certainty, it is not overstating things to say that this is still murder.

Just as the news of continued American hegemony is no shock, no one should be surprised to learn that the United States government will incinerate innocents in large numbers without impunity. While asserting its claim to strike wherever it wants whenever it wants, the United States government has killed over 2,400 people in the past five years alone with its drone program.

There is another thing that Obama opted not to say, but can be heard loud and clear from his actions, of which the American people should take special note. No matter what commendable values you think a politician holds, you can count on power to push them elsewhere.

The United States government’s long campaign of chaos in Iraq has been a thoroughly bi-partisan project. Under Democrat John F. Kennedy, the CIA took actions to overthrow unfriendly leaders. Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush sold Saddam Hussein the weapons he would use against his own people, before Bush invaded the country in the First Gulf War. Democrat Bill Clinton spent the 90s starving children with sanctions, dropping bombs, and officially changing United States’s Iraq policy to one of regime change.

In 2003, Republican George Walker Bush actualized that policy, by initiating the Second Gulf War. As Americans grew to hate that war more and more, two Democratic Presidential candidates in a row ran campaigns that heavily capitalized off calls for peace.

Now those candidates are in positions to actually decide U.S. policy in Iraq: John Kerry as Secretary of State, and Barack Obama as President. With that power, they have decided to send in military personnel, drop bombs, and maintain American dominance.

Having heard all this, the American people must start to make a statement of their own. They must refuse to fight.

Knowing that the United States military will be used for aggression and domination, no matter who controls it, they must refuse to join. Moreover, they must do all they can to work toward the day when Presidents and Secretaries of State are deprived of the voice they need to make their threats and stake their claims.

Iraq: Endless Imperial Surgery

Brian Nicholson — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 18:00:22 +0000

U.S. bombs fall on Iraq yet again, in strikes authorized by Barack Obama against the militant Islamist group Islamic State, which has taken over a chunk of the country. Between this and the deployment of US military “advisers,” the memory of Obama’s campaign criticizing war in Iraq on his way to office has grown a thick layer of moss. Yet again, faith placed in leaders, in government, to represent any interest but their own is dashed on the rocks of reality.

Curiously, along with the usual “more and faster, please!” screams from the likes of Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, another current of pro-war advocacy has bubbled up: They claim a “Responsibility To Protect,” spun as a debt incurred from the 2003 Iraq invasion and its fallout.

The train of thought is that the U.S.’s (continued) involvement in Iraq is owed because the emergence of sectarian warfare is, after all, the fault of the US post-Saddam. The arrogantly militaristic Can Do spirit at use here is clear enough already, but this also inherently comes with a rather clipped understanding of basic history. The story of western interference in Iraq does not start with the falsehoods of the “W” Bush Administration. In fact, the modern nation of Iraq itself was stitched together originally as a protectorate under the British, from pieces of the Ottoman Empire broken up after World War One. After the passing of the torch of hegemony from Britain to the U.S., one of the first things the U.S. government did in Iraq was back a coup by the Baathists — including one Saddam Hussein — in 1963. Later on, the CIA would aid Saddam’s regime in chemical weapons attacks.

Turning on the US’s own creation in the ’90s brought more war, sanctions that clearly hit Iraqi civilians much harder than anyone in the regime, and then the invasion and subsequent installation of yet another western client government.

Looking back at the “debt” rationale for new intervention in light of the full record of the past, the naive nature of it is blinding. Following it to the letter effectively places a debt going back nearly a hundred years. However, the currency being proposed for exchange is not the profuse apology & restitution that would take place on the level of non-state individuals, but bombs, missiles, and manipulation. That these make up the initial damage reveals the “offer” of supposed benevolent empire to be a sick joke. What is owed to the Iraq people by the U.S. government, after all this time of bloodshed and lies, is admission of guilt, followed by an exit from the world stage, head held low in shame.

In a nod to recent history, the beginning strikes in this ongoing chapter of empire were launched from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. Without the end of U.S. hegemony, attainable only via the end of the state itself, news viewers may be greeted in 2044 by headlines about President Sasha Obama launching airstrikes on Iraq from the USS John Ellis Bush.