Tattered Glory” by Helena Martin
A recent BBC News article asked the quite pertinent question of whether
U.S. politics is “beyond repair”. The points that the
writer Nick Bryant makes regarding political “hyperpartisanship”, what he terms
“the degradation of debate” and the corruption of both major political parties
on the electoral front are quite valid, but fail to get to the heart of the
matter. This is because it does not address deeper issues that link America’s
social, political and economic malaise to the need for profound reform of
America’s rigged economic system, its flawed electoral laws and its prevailing
foreign policy.
America’s
Economic System
The United
States is a heavily indebted country. As of February 2020, the debt of the
federal government stands at just over $23 trillion. It is a state of affairs
which is often discussed at great length and one in which the country’s politicians
and economists direct a great deal of blame at specific targets. Yet, no
American politician of prominence ever addresses the role of usury at the heart
of an economic system which is geared towards the facilitation of enduring and
frequently unpayable debt.
Under a
capitalist system, which some have termed state-sponsored usury; an unremarked
but ever present conflict persists between labour and usury. And while usury is
persistently triumphant, the inescapable truth is that labour is the only source
of value. America needs to reject usury as the basis of money supply.
Unfortunately,
there are few eminent intellectuals who are calling for such a profound change,
which would logically begin with the abolition of the Federal Reserve System.
The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to take away control of the supply of
money from America’s elected officials and privatise the supply of money and
credit. As a result, it functions to serve the interests of the monied classes
and not the public interest.
And while its
heads are appointed by Washington, the oligarchs of Wall Street possess an
effective power of veto. While its official aims are to promote “price
stability” and “full employment”, a closer analysis of its modus operandi and
its record in these areas reveals that attaining these objectives always involves
subordinating the wider public interest to the interests of the financiers.
Indeed, Alan Greenspan, the one-time head of the Federal Reserve, once stated
that he believed full employment to be incompatible with the ideal of price
stability. The body was responsible for using American taxpayer’s money to fund
a bailout of ‘too-big-to-fail’ financial organisations, many of who operated in
a criminally negligent manner while many Americans had to endure the
humiliation of property foreclosures, denuded pensions and unemployment. In the
final analysis, it exists to promote the interests of the minuscule creditor
class at the expense of the majority debtor class.
In his book Killing the Host, Michael Hudson, a
distinguished professor of economics, argued the case for re-regulating the
whole of the financial system. This would require a revolutionary tax policy
geared towards preventing the financial sector from extracting economic surplus
and capitalizing on debt obligations paying interest to that sector.
The ending of
the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union is often hailed as the
historical triumph of laissez faire economics. Yet, contentious debate about
the merits of the Austrian School of Economics in relation to the Keynesian
School, or of capitalist versus socialist models ignore the crucial issue of
usury which saddles most of the population with debt.
Those in
America who argue for neo-liberalism also ignore the fact that it has created
as many ills in society as its proponents claim socialism creates. Only a small
fraction of the society thrive in a system that is rigged in favour of
oligarchs and corporations who often pay a lower tax rate than the average
working man. It creates the conditions through which the parasitical and
exploitative role of hedge-fund speculators can thrive. The neo-liberal
ideology also creates the sort of casino banking culture that brought the
United States to the brink of economic collapse in the late 2000s, as well as the
sort of vulture capitalism which wrecks small American communities, the island
of Puerto Rico and nation states such as Argentina and the Congo.
America’s
Electoral Funding Laws
The
development of the laws governing the funding of America’s elections, beginning
with the 1976 case of Buckley versus Valeo culminated in the Citizens United
versus Federal Electoral Commission case of 2010 has effectively given
unrestricted power to the oligarchs who control America’s political class.
The decision
in Buckley involved striking down certain provisions of the Federal Election
Campaign Act (1974), which removed limits to the amount of money which could be
spent on campaigns, although limits remained in regard to the contributions of
individuals. The Citizens United case went further. In overturning sections of
the Campaign Reform Act (2002), it removed limits to expenditures made by
non-profit and for-profit corporations. And in 2014, McCutcheon versus Federal
Election Commission added to this by removing the biennial aggregate limit on
individual contributions to national party and federal candidate committees.
Former
President Jimmy Carter once bluntly stated what the implications are:
It violates
the essence of what made America a great nation in its political system. Now
it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of
getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same
thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So now we’ve
just seen a subversion of our political system as a major pay-off to major
contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favours for themselves
after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and
Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.
Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.
The law
ensures that both Democratic and Republican parties are under the thrall of the
rich and super-powerful lobbies such as the military industry, the Israel lobby
and Wall Street interests. It also means that little or no scrutiny is
directed, for instance, at the activities of sponsors such as Paul Singer, the
second largest donor to the Republican Party in 2016 who funded a super-PAC
that supports Republican senators.
It has also
had implications in regard to the calibrating of the foreign policy of the
United States. For instance, the financial contribution made to the election
campaign of Donald Trump by the billionaire and self-avowed ‘Israel-Firster’
Sheldon Adelson, was explicitly related to changes in foreign policy. Adelson
demanded that Trump recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the
American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He also expected Trump to renege
on the nuclear agreement painstakingly reached between Iran and other nations.
All of this has only succeeded in dangerously ratcheting up tensions in the
Middle East.
For some,
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is controlled by a triumvirate of
oligarchs: Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus and Paul Singer; a cynical but
understandable analysis of the situation.
American Foreign
Policy
Few among the
American populace appear to be aware of the fundamentally unchanging nature of
U.S. foreign policy. American militarism expressed through a perpetual
interventionist policy of regime change has added considerably to its national debt
and undermined its moral authority among the global community of nations. While
regime change policies have a basis in the application of ‘American
Exceptionalism’, as well as the influence of the neoconservative ideology, the
unbending trajectory of foreign policy owes a great deal to the machinations of
a hidden government of the sort expounded by the 19th century English
constitutionalist Walter Bagehot.
While the
term ‘Deep State’ has entered the lexicon of everyday language, it is rarely
clearly defined and specifically linked to the conduct of America’s foreign
policy, which Professor Michael J. Glennon of Tufts University posits has a
great deal to do with an unaccountable entity that wields a great deal of power
in the governance of a nation.
Glennon's
argument is that what he terms the ‘Trumanite’ institutions composed of
ex-military and security officials run national security policies at the
expense of the ‘Madisonian’ institutions; that is, the separated organs of
state which function to constitutionally check the power of each other and who
are accountable to the electorate.
This
assessment partly explains why no politician of note has ever addressed retired
U.S. General Wesley Clark’s assertion that American foreign policy was “hijacked” by “some
hard-nosed people” in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11th 2001.
They have failed to address the war agenda revealed in numerous position papers
published by neoconservative think tanks in the 1990s and 2000s which called
for the destruction of a number of states perceived as being opposed to the
interests of the United States. Uncoincidentally, most were enemies of the
State of Israel.
While
visiting the Pentagon during the period following the September 11 attacks,
Clark was shown a plan of action which proposed the destruction of seven
countries over a five-year period, starting with Iraq and ending with Iran.
What is remarkable about Clark’s revelation is that all the countries on that
list have been targeted since that time by a series of overt and covert
military actions carried out by different administrations. Glennon’s allusion
to the ascendancy of Trumanite institutions goes some way in explaining the
unchanging national security policy of the administrations led by George W.
Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
The result of
the implementation of the agenda has been an enduring engagement in
Afghanistan, invaded in 2001 under the guise of a police action, but which has
turned out to be America’s longest war; the respective destructive wars against
Arab secular governments of Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as the imposition of
sanctions and persistent threats of war made against Iran.
The other
salient expression of the new militarism developed in the aftermath of the
ending of the Cold War is the designation of Russia as an enemy state. Here,
the twin doctrines expressed respectively by Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew
Brzeziński, have been crucial. The Wolfowitz Doctrine sought to formalise
American hegemony by sanctioning the overthrow of governments resistant to the
dictates of American interests and accepting such course of actions even when
riding roughshod over multilateral agreements. The Brzeziński Doctrine
incorporated a resolve to militarily intimidate and ideally balkanise Russia
for it to be used as a source of the energy needs of the West. Both doctrines
endorsed the view that in the light of dissolution of the Soviet Union, no
power should be allowed to rise and challenge American supremacy over the
globe.
This led to
the expansion of NATO in contravention of an agreement reached between the
leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union that a condition for the
reunification of Germany would be that NATO should not expand one inch
eastwards. It has also resulted in the unilateral abrogation by the United
States of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in July 2002 by George W.
Bush and Donald Trump’s renunciation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF)
treaty in August 2019.
A concomitant
to this prevailing policy has been the orchestrated demonisation of Vladimir
Putin -once compared to Adolf Hitler by Hillary Clinton- whose foreign policy
decisions in relation to military engagements in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria
have all been reactive to U.S. foreign policy objectives of destabilisation.
The United
States, which has not won a war since World War II, constantly risks igniting a
Third World War by these actions, which are stimulated by the Military Industry
which thrives on the existence of conflicts. It bullies smaller nations through
the threat of or imposition of sanctions and hypocritically, it has fought a
succession of proxy wars through Islamist fanatics professing the ideology of
the group which it holds responsible for instigating the 9/11 attacks.
Conclusion
Few Americans
appear to be cognisant of the relative powerlessness of the office of the
presidency. It is occupied by a person who may espouse and administer policies
which appeal to their ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’ constituents in the typically
fractious discourse that permeates America’s ‘Culture Wars’, but who cannot
address the fundamental issues affecting America’s decline.
Unless these
issues relating to usurious economics, the control of politicians by oligarchs
and the pernicious rationales governing foreign policy begin to be seriously
addressed by America’s political and intellectual classes, the malaise,
characterised by unending wars, extraordinary sovereign debt and increasing
social polarisation, looks certain to bring about the collapse of the American
Republic.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2020).
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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