The Illusion of Power
 Power
is deceptive. Those who have power overestimate
the extent and the permanence of it. Those
without power similarly overestimate its
permanence, even as they underestimate their own
power and ability to change things.
The Bush regime believes it is all powerful.
Those in opposition underestimate the Bush
administration’s weaknesses and underestimate
their ability to destroy the arrogant Bush
regime.
In general, people tend to think in terms of
years instead of decades. The Bush
administration’s time horizon is much, much
closer; they tend to think of hours instead of
years.
However, the five years since 9/11, the weakness
of the U.S. empire has been exposed. Even if
people in this country do not realize it, people
throughout the world do realize the weakness of
the “American Empire,” which is rooted in its
internal corruption, a corruption that permeates
every aspect of American life. The war
profiteers make money but can’t seem to create a
population willing to fight. The ruling class
has sacked the American treasury. There is no
money for healthcare, education, or even the
basic infrastructure of our country.
Katrina is the most dramatic and vicious example
of the unwillingness of the ruling class to
provide for the working class, but the weakness
doesn’t stop there. Instead, we are weak even in
the places where the power structure says it
wants to be strong. Recently, the Marines were
called upon to produce troops for Iraq and other
areas, despite the fact that they are
undermanned and face budget restraints. The most
significant statistic is that the recruiting
pool for the Marines shrunk by one million
between 2000 and 2004 . Education is so
under-funded that it can’t adequately educate
the working class, which makes up the primary
recruiting pool, to even go and fight wars. The
ruling class is so concentrated on making money
that they cannot even make those who are not
making money go to war to protect their
interests!
In addition, male supremacy within the Army,
Navy, and Air Force has caused sexual attacks on
young women recruits. The armed forces have had
to totally reeducate their recruits against male
supremacy, which ironically is a mainstay of
their political ideology. They are training
their army in a philosophy contrary to their
capitalist position.
More immediately, the corruption directly
affects the current Army’s ability to fight:
In the aftermath of the
onslaught on Lebanon you can open up the Israeli
press, particularly the Hebrew editions, and
find fierce assaults on the country’s elites
from left, right and center
The overall panorama is one
of chickens of all ages coming home to roost.
mall pustules highlight large rot. Chief of
Staff Dan Halutz, a narcissistic bully, secretly
took time off the morning he ordered the terror
bombing of south Beirut to tell Bank Leumi to
sell his stock portfolio before the market
plunged, which it soon did by nearly 10 percent.
The capacity of the US armed forces to fight
intelligently and effectively has been almost
destroyed by a system of graft-ridden
procurement that favors expensive weapons
systems validated by bogus tests. Israel’s
supposed military requirements have been a
particularly ripe sector of that racket and the
consequences are plain to see. Israel’s receipt
of Patriot missiles was no doubt hugely
profitable for the parties involved in the
transaction, but in defensive function entirely
useless. The Patriot missile batteries stationed
near Haifa and Safed, much trumpeted by the
Israel Defense Forces, played no significant
role in the recent conflict.
Israel’s generals paraded on TV in resplendent
uniforms even as people in northern Israel too
poor to flee found either no shelters at all
(particularly Israel Arabs) or, in other words
of Reuven Pedatzur in Ha’aretz, “sat for more
than one month in stinking shelters, some of
them without food or minimal conditions.”
Disfigured by its “special relationship” with
the US arms industry, of which the US Congress
is an integral component, the IDF has been
morally corrupted by years of
risk-free-brutalization of unarmed Palestinians,
many of them children. It’s one thing to level
an apartment building with a missile from a
plane or crush a protester with a bulldozer of
lob shells at a Palestinian family having a
picnic on a beach or kidnap middle-aged and
democratically elected Palestinian politicians.
It’s another to confront a foe, with modest but
effectively deployed weaponry, prepared to fight
back.
Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, Volume 283,
Number 7, 9/11/06 (Page 10)
There are several things about the Cockburn
article that are important, even though I rarely
agree with him and even here he wanders away
from the subject. But it is not who articulates
the position but what is said. In any discourse,
political or otherwise, the first step in this
country is to attack the speaker, not the
content of the thought. Even ancient Greeks
understood the logical fallacy “argumentum ad
hominum”.
In this case, Cockburn is absolutely correct.
The corruption of our system permeates every
aspect of our society, causing us to be
powerfully destructive but substantially and
morally weak, corrupt and ideologically
wrongheaded.
The corruption goes to the very core of our
society. Cockburn notes in passing that the
reason these weapons are built is to reward the
war profiteers, not to win wars. This is an
important point; these huge weapons are
tremendously destructive but not militarily
tactical. The corruption is there; not explicit
bribes and thievery as we typically understand
those concepts, but corruption nonetheless. The
US war machine is built by taxing working people
who are indoctrinated with fear and xenophobia.
Since the prevailing ideology is that firepower
wins wars, not correct strategic and tactical
military use of a committed army, it is easy to
sell bigger and more expensive weapons. That
feeds the coffers of the war profiteers but it
does not create an effective defense. That is
why in Afghanistan, we see ten million dollar
bombs being used to blow up horse-drawn carts
alleged to contain a rifle. It is also why the
Taliban is now coming back to power and the
production of opium is higher than any time in
history. The war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Lebanon only increases the power of religious
extremists, and further impoverishes the working
class in this country. The corruption,
therefore, is not simply bribes and crimes, but
is an entire system of exploitation and
commercialization of civilization.
In order to illustrate the degree and extent of
the corruption in this society, I turn to
sports, which have become the metaphor for our
society and a dead-on barometer for where we
are.
Sports and games are the one distraction for
those people who are given no other purpose in
life. We have created a corrupt sports system
that mirrors the kind of government and world we
have created as well:
International sport has long been a form of
nationalism, if not an outright proxy for war.
Why the swell of pride when the United States,
amid cold war tensions, defeated the Soviet
Union and then won the gold-medal fame at the
1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid? For
millions of Americans (few of whom actually
cared much about hockey), those victories by a
squad of plucky underdogs seemed to affirm
something about our national character. So what
exactly are we to think now that the United
States, the last remaining superpower, has
become a doormat in the realm of sports?
Our athletes in individual sports – Lance,
Tiger, Venus – have been capable of transcendent
solo performances, and the United States women
have won recent world championships in soccer,
basketball and softball. But our men’s soccer
team failed to muster one victory at the World
Cup in Germany. The United States baseball team,
at the inaugural World Baseball Classic last
March, was defeated by Mexico, Korea and Canada
– Canada! – and could not make it even to the
semifinals.
It gets worse. United States basketball, long
the most dominant of our national teams, has
arguably been the most humiliated. The 1992
Dream Team – Jordan, Bird, Magic – brought the
American game to the world, a seamless mesh of
skill, creativity, improvisation and intuitive
teamwork. A mere 12 years later, another Olympic
squad of N.B.A. stars, led by the shoot-first
point guards Stephon Marbury and Allen Iverson
and coached by the mercurial Larry Brown, were a
dysfunctional mess. On the way to a bronze
medal, they lost to Lithuania and for blown out
by Puerto Rico.
There is nothing like being beaten at your own
game to focus the mind. In preparation for the
world championships in Japan (Aug. 19-Sep.3),
the new leadership of men’s USA Basketball –
Jerry Colangelo, its managing director, and
Coach Mike Krzyzewski, the longtime head man at
Duke – staged a grand experiment. They convinced
24 players to commit to three years of summer
training, leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics
in Beijing. And even though Colangelo refuses to
use the word “cuts,” only 12 players can be on
the roster for an international competition,
meaning several of them are trying out for a
team for the first time in many years, or
perhaps ever.
Most radical of all, the invitees included not
just megastars like LeBron James, Dwayne Wade
and Kobe Bryant, but also workhorses like Bruce
Bowen, Shane Battier and Chauncy Billups. The
hope is that a true national team will emerge
rather than a thrown-together group of
all-stars.
New York Times Sports
Magazine, 9/06, Michael Sokolove, Page 18.
Contrary to the position above
promoted by Sokolove, the explanation for USA
deterioration is not simply salaries paid to
so-called superstars. Money corrupts, but this
is far deeper and far more pernicious. I watched
the USA get beaten at the World Championships,
and what struck me is the way the game played in
the NBA has corrupted the players themselves.
LeBron James and Dwyane Wade have become
accustomed to getting every call even though 50
percent of the time it is undeserved. Because
they are commercial players with big advertising
contracts, they get calls they don’t deserve. At
the World Championships, those calls were not
given, nor should they have been. Anyone can
easily see how these great athletes were unable
to adjust. The team from Greece which had
absolutely no “superstars” easily beat them.
This is the result of a system that is corrupt
to the core. Just as weapons are made for
profit, not to win wars, players are trained to
make money, not to learn the fundamentals of
team play.
More importantly, the ideology which underpins
the American empire is one of individualism and
self gratification. In that situation, there is
no reason for blind patriotism. Obviously, when
Chaney, Bush, Wolfowicz, Rumsfeld, and Pearl
refused to fight for the United States because
their careers might be affected, then no one
will fight for any length of time.
In the 1970’s, the U.S. developed an economic
draft. By that I mean that the U.S. provided
enough income and incentives to attract poor
working people into the service. They had no
other viable alternatives. But when these same
working poor see the complete corruption of this
society, they soon tire of sacrificing their
bodies for a leadership that cares nothing for
the country or for the soldiers or for anyone
else.
The United States is a powerful imperialistic
power. That power, used wisely, could further
enrich this country and enhance civilization
throughout the world. Capitalism at the stage of
imperialism, however, is interested not in
civilization but in immediate maximum profit.
The Bush II regime enforces that worldview. As a
result, it lies to initiate an illegal war, uses
torture to execute useless espionage, murders
600,000 Iraqis, and impoverishes the American
working class allowing the most vulnerable to
suffer horrible deaths as happened in Katrina.
That is a corrupt system. Now, with its
announcement of nuclear testing and the United
States’s anemic and obviously fearful response,
the little country of North Korea has exposed
the weakness of an imperialistic power that is
morally corrupt and militarily impotent. Sadly,
while unable to create a society that allows
working people to live in peace, this power
stills retains the ability to destroy, kill and
maim.
Again, we have an alternative vision. One that
respects individual societies and promotes
individual development, but recognizes that the
concentration of wealth in the hands of the few
only breeds corruption. We can and will create a
society that rewards collective effort with
public and socialized civilization that is
sustainable. We can and will reward individual
achievement, eliminate privilege and contain the
greed to which individuals so often fall prey.
Yours in Struggle,
-
Ronald D. Glotta
220 Bagley, Suite 808
Detroit, Michigan 48226
(313) 963-1320
(313) 963-1325 fax
rglotta@glottaassociates.com
www.glottaassociates.com
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