We Chose the Suicide Option - Chalmers Johnson

In the introduction to his final book, Dismantling the Empire, America’s Last Best Hope (just out in paperback), he took up a recurring topic of interest to him: “the choice between republic and empire,” and the way “our imperial dreams stretch our means to the breaking point and threaten our future.” Among “the alternatives available to us as a nation,” he wrote, “we are choosing what I call the suicide option.” He added that “it might not have to be this way, that we could still move in a different direction.” Those were, in a sense, his last words. How true they remain three and a half months after his death. Tom Englehart, Tom Dispatch

Review of the Uncivil Society

The Uncivil Society by Stephan Kotkin dispels many of the myths created surrounding the 1989 fall of the Soviet Empire. His reviewer in the New York Times Book Review, Serge Schmemann, notes a sobering parallel.
"Ultimately, Kotkin writes, the system was crushed by the “double whammy” of Gorbachev, who lifted the threat of military intervention, and a political class that proved unable to compete with capitalism. Still, the reader shouldn’t get too smug on revisiting that victory. Kotkin suggests a sobering parallel between the bankruptcy of the Eastern elites and the ruinous excesses of Western elites as revealed in the financial meltdown of 2008."
In 1989 the leadership cashed in and got out. In 2008 the leadership discovered they would not be punished for their excesses.

Seeking Empire

Seeking empire or even hegemony in Asia is a poor idea for Americans. The continent is littered with the bones of would-be conquerors.Why do you think the Chinese fund our wars in Asia? Do they have a death wish buying up our toxic financial paper or soon-to-be-worthless treasuries?We invaded and occupied two sovereign nations to settle the 9/11 account. To this day we are not sure who did what to whom.Our world view is faulty. From the cradle we learn we are superior to other races and nationalities. Ridding our hearts of these hatreds is a monumental task maybe impossible. However, it is possible to put our demons on the back burner.As for the Mumbai tragedy, we might think before we rush to judgment. Who seeks to benefit from the atrocity?

The Cult of the Presidency

Opednews.com

In a superb new book, entitled The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, Gene Healy documents the multiple ways our political system has been corrupted by an out-of-control, unchecked Executive that could not be any more antithetical to the "presidency of limited powers and modest goals the Framers gave us in 1787." As Healy demonstrates, allowing the President to transmute into some central, omnipotent figure of authority -- as Bush/Cheney have done and as McCain seems to embrace -- "is the source of much of our political woe and some of the gravest threats to our liberties," and -- more significantly still -- this model (as the Founders recognized) virtually guarantees a state of ever-expanding militarism and endless war:

Throughout American history, virtually every major advance in executive power has come during a war or a warlike crisis. Convince the public that we are at war, and constitutional barriers to action fall, as power flows to the commander in chief.

Little wonder, then, that confronted with impossible expectations, the modern president tends to recast social and economic problems in military terms . . . . Martial rhetoric often ushers in domestic militarism, as presidents push to employ standing armies at home, to fight drug trafficking, terrorism or natural disasters. And when the president raises the battle cry, he can usually count on substantial numbers of American opinion leaders to cheer him on.

As the amazing commenter Pow Wow repeatedly documents here (see here for one typically excellent example), Congress has "increasingly deferred, dangerously and slavishly, to the presidency, which today very much resembles a monarchy," a state of affairs which -- for the reasons Healy describes -- makes endless war and imperial behavior almost inevitable. As Pow Wow puts it: "The choice for Americans today . . . is between Empire and Republic. We cannot have both."

The central truth of the 2008 election is that, with the exception of a few relatively inconsequential and symbolic matters, John McCain enthusiastically embraces the Bush/Cheney worldview in every way that matters. His ludicrous speech yesterday -- actually complaining that it is the judiciary that wields too much power and is excessively limiting presidential powers -- simply leaves no doubt about that.

-- Glenn Greenwald