For the US, the best one can hope for is a President who becomes a reformist after assuming office (as in the case of Gorby, if it were obvious that they set out to reform the system, they wouldn't be allowed to assume power) and then one can only hope that when internal conflict is unleashed it doesn't spill over.

Otherwise the US is going to have to lose WWIII, or something.

Bush is a symptom, not the disease.

most nights I'd  be down with the shark jumping mob.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

you are the media you consume.

Well, I think there is a great future for "America" and our people (as there is for Russia), but the US of A has to come apart (as did the USSR) before it can be built.

rdf said

As I have stated many times before, without a realistic plan on how to overcome the power of the vested interests there is little chance of any of this happening. Expecting the people to demand reform is wishful thinking. It is nice for someone to put the whole argument in one place, however.

and I think this goes to the heart of the matter -- a troubling question that should be engaged seriously: how can the power of vested interests be overcome -- aside from the very expensive and destructive well-known ways like armed revolution, civilisational crash, etc?

any examples from history of a ruling class being deposed peacefully?

one way to overcome the vested interests is to withdraw from their official, command/control economy and divert more and more of the nation's labour, intelligence and wealth into the informal sector, until the institutions of the informal sector simply replace the atrophied, sclerotic institutions of the old elite.  this building of parallel institutions and withdrawal from official structures is a very old technique:  Gandhi and his charka and salt-gathering, for example, or various local currency efforts.

all it would take to bring down Coca Cola or Mickey D's is for everyone to stop buying their stuff.  this vulnerability to the customer is imho what drives their obsession with creating captive markets and monopolies, so that the customer will not have that option.  right now f'rexample Big Chemical Ag is mobilising to try to exterminate organic agriculture -- or utterly co-opt it -- because more and more consumers are voting with their pocketbooks for organic food.  so Big Ag mobilises via "health" scares, HSA "food security" laws, more and more restrictive legislation to strangle small farmers and producers, rewriting organic standards into semantic nullity, stuffing FDA upper echelons with their myrmidons, etc.  meanwhile the gene vandals are doing their damnedest to contaminate every form of plant life on the planet with GMO pollen, so that there will be no non-GMO option for consumers to choose.  just like the auto/rubber/oil barons made sure that LA residents no longer had the option of rail transit.  and so on.  capitalists may preach about choice and swashbuckling entrepreneurial risk-taking all day long, but their actions are all about eliminating choice (for the customer) and risk (for themselves).

eventually their control mania -- be it Big Ag or the MPAA/RIAA or the Fibbies or whoever wants to be the boss of us -- gets so intense that they leave so small a space of "legitimate" activity for the citizenry that most everyone is outside it -- the majority of the population becomes by official definition insurgent or outlaw or scofflaw.  this I think is the tipping point where a majority of the people have no confidence/trust in or respect for the regime, and exist in sullen covert, or enraged overt, resistance to it...

so what happens when everyone gets sick of Windoze and uses Linux, when everyone gets sick of copyrighted music and video and just makes and trades their own, when everyone gets sick of being id'd and xrayed and interrogated and stop-n-searched and just stops travelling except by foot, bike, and hitchhiking?  what happens if local currencies spring up everywhere and the finance feudalists can't get their mitts on local transactions to skim the cream?

I know I'm dreaming here.  these examples are far too simplistic.  but it's the only (mostly) nonviolent way I see to muzzle the power of the corporate overlords.  most of what they sell us, we don't need;  they spend billions per annum trying to make us believe we do, which tells us everything we need to know, right there... :-)

anyway, I think rdf's practical question -- how do we even get near CJ's sensible proposals, with so much powerful vested interest poised to crush any such programme by any means necessary [don't forget rootless' list of murdered 3w leaders]? -- is terribly important.  I gnaw on this question daily.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

you speak the fears we rarely dare to name, de, and i for one am very grateful.

i gave a rosy-with-the-light-of-spring vote of 25%, normally i would be in the last category.

america is a mostly (sorta) educated country, with a lot of people who share a generously healthy dose of what passes for common sense these days. they are also liguistically and technologically connected in ways that are beginning to seriously subvert the rich capitalist white boys-with-token-minorities status quo. i can't believe they will stay under the radar for long, let alone ever.

as many have pointed out, like howard dean, fr'example, WE have the power, and could bring the truman show crashing down with a general strike as crowbar. add ghandi-level civil disobedience, and 'they' have to show the exceedingly ugly and unjustifiable cards left in their hand.

they do not seem to have any problems with doing so, and persuading vassal states like europe to go along, overtly or covertly, but sooner or later they will have to go too far domestically, another kent state, for example, or some scamdal-du-jour will be the last straw....wtc traced back to the WH would qualify, or some other 'terrorist attack' and the removal of all civil liberties, or....take yer pick, the list is long!

the whole ball of wax is so totally unsustainable it's a stone miracle it's holding together at all.

if the usa is 'asked' to give up too much empire too quickly, the yes, it's back under the covers again...spent most of my mental life there anyway, so used to that funk...

if we did muddle through though, i'd find it more dignified to have done a little more than that to help bring it about, so right now i'm clinging like a polar bear to a melting ice spar to the comforting illusion that the space brethren are watching o'er us....or that dkos' readership will quantum leap to 12. 20, 40 million readers and suddenly a gaggle of inspired populists will break loose, form a new 'grown-ups' party, led by a cross between bill moyers, jim hightower, amy goodman, and studs terkel, with a dash of bonnie raitt for added colour....hemp will be legalised, and people will chill, working 20 hour weeks and swapping dvds on bittorrent, and leaving 'success' behind, releasing the inner slacker and realising if everyone was a bikeriding vegan there would be no need for resource wars and we could all stay home and play donkey kong, or piano, or a novel blend of both...and the oil would never run out because hemp grew in every ditch and alley, and thc had located and uploaded to every cannabinoid receptor still single..

and the earth snored on in untroubled slumber...while we silly humans did what we do best....how did kurt put it...just fart around?

being goofy and prolonging the ecstasy

ecstasy |?ekst?s?| noun ( pl. -sies) 1 an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement : there was a look of ecstasy on his face | they went into ecstasies over the view. See note at rapture . 2 chiefly archaic an emotional or religious frenzy or trancelike state, originally one involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence. 3 ( Ecstasy) an illegal amphetamine-based synthetic drug with euphoric and hallucinatory effects, originally promoted as an adjunct to psychotherapy. (abbr.: MDMA) .ORIGIN late Middle English (sense 2 ): from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis `standing outside oneself,' based on ek- `out' + histanai `to place.'

/ in case that doesn't ring a bell.

"If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles." Sun Tzu

KZ: Your book faces up to a key question that is rarely discussed in the U.S. media -- American Empire. I expect many in the media and the public do not think of the U.S. as an empire. Please explain why you call the U.S. an empire?

TP: You are quite correct in noting that the U.S. media fails to even acknowledge that Americans live in an empire. I call the U.S. an empire because it is clear to any serious student of history that it became one in the aftermath of World War II when England surrendered its colonies and accepted the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella from the beginnings of the Cold War.

The entire period of the late 1940s through the early 1960s was an age of de-colonization from the empires of Britain, France, and Germany. Yet, during this period the Cold War provided the context for the U.S. to embark upon neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism in order to protect the so-called "Free World." The reality is that the Free World is not really "free" in terms of civil liberties and human rights. It is free to open access by U.S.-based corporations and multinational/transnational business interests.

To assist in this structuring of the world economy in line with the American Establishment, the IMF, World Bank, and WTO have been established to govern the world economy and as many countries as possible within its orbit. To that end, both Wall Street and the U.S. Treasury Department -- as the centers of U.S. finance and capital -- give the rest of the world within its "sphere of influence" their marching orders. We see this as Third World nations have structural adjustment programs shoved down their throats by the IMF. These structural adjustment programs, SAPs, that are imposed by the IMF function so as to order the governments who are the recipients of these loans to break up labor unions, suspend wage structures that benefit workers, and condone the rape of the environment.

All of this is undertaken by the U.S. Global Empire in the furtherance of its corporate allies and in its strategic search for obtaining natural resources -- such as oil, tungsten, ore -- to shore up its domination of the planet. In fact, the Pentagon has said as much in its planning documents since 2001 when it writes of "full spectrum dominance." What is that? It is the control of not only land, air, and sea by the American Empire, but outer space as well.

The weaponization of space is a high priority for the Bush-2 regime [...]

and now for the good news:

KZ: You also claim that the American empire is falling. What evidence do you have of that?

TP: I do claim that the American Empire is falling. To begin with, the U.S. Governments borrows $2-billion dollars a day from China just to keep the American economy going. China is basically borrowing worthless U.S. Treasury Bonds that are backed up by nothing more than the promise of the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. Government. Ever since the U.S. went off the gold standard during the Nixon presidency, the dollar is not backed by anything -- except the military strength of the nation and its worldwide domination over most foreign currencies. However, those days might well be ending as the Euro takes its place as the dominant currency of the European Union and Europe begins to follow different policy choices and paths from the architects of the American Empire.

Additionally, the breakdown of the so-called "Washington Consensus" in the late 1990s means that the economic model of Neo-liberalism is no longer a viable model for the developing nations of the Third World and those nations -- such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador that want to walk an independent path from that proclaimed by the architects of the empire and expressed through the policies of the IMF, World Bank WTO, and Free Trade Agreements (such as NAFTA and CAFTA).

[...]

KZ: Should the U.S. empire end? From the perspective of Americans, is it bad for us? Don't we get cheap products, a variety of produce, and access to critical resources? What do we lose by being an empire? Do we have to choose between empire and democracy -- are they, in the end, mutually exclusive?

TP: Should the U.S. Empire end? Yes, it should end because it is not sustainable for either the average American or for the rest of the world. It is equally bad for Americans as it is for billions of people trapped in poverty throughout the Global South.

The tragedy is that the average American does not know how bad it is or that he/she is an expendable subject within the empire. Certainly the middle-class is starting to see the effects of this empire when jobs are "outsourced" to cheap Third World labor markets and are not replaced, when the tax structure favors the richest two percent while gaps in national inequality continue to grow, when the education system continues to collapse, when political action becomes irrelevant within a two-party system that is owned and paid for by the same corporate elite.

The question becomes: "What do we lose by becoming an empire?" The short answer is that we lose our democracy. That is because empire and democracy are mutually exclusive. A choice has to be made between the two -- either consciously or by default. I wrote Exodus from Empire in the hope that enough Americans would read it in order to prevent the choice being made by default.

[...]

Americans are directly harmed by the fact that their civil liberties under the Bill of Rights have been shredded. Further, America's place in the world is diminished by the fact that as U.S. Corporations -- operating under the protection of the American Empire -- repress wages and workers throughout the Global South, so too, wages are depressed in the United States itself. Higher levels of inequality throughout the entire period of the Bush years are a testament to that reality - as is the absence of affordable health care for most Americans. As a result, Medicare is going bankrupt because the insurance companies and AMA lobby and the pharmaceutical industry-lobby remain protected enclaves of capitalist profit and exploitation. Congress is either powerless to rectify the situation or simply too corrupted by pay-offs to correct the situation.

meanwhile, Bush grants himself special emergency powers:

With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.

In a new National Security Presidential Directive, Bush lays out his plans for dealing with a "catastrophic emergency."

Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility "for ensuring constitutional government."

He laid this all out in a document entitled "National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51" and "Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20."

The White House released it on May 9.

Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.

The subject of the document is entitled "National Continuity Policy."

It defines a "catastrophic emergency" as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function."

This could mean another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California, I imagine, since it says it would include "localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies."

maybe we need a new poll:  will there be any US national elections in 2008?  or will there be an an "incident" which will justify a State of Emergency?

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...