[The] Failed [United] State[s of America]

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Dec 13, 2008 at 08:30


Last night, Glenn Greenwald appeared on Bill Moyers Journal.  For those of us familiar with his writing, there was really no new ground broken.  It was simply supremely satisfying to see him talking sanely with Bill Moyers for a spell.

But there was one thing that stood out for me--not a new thought, but an aptly articulated one:

GLENN GREENWALD: ...it was only once I saw how radical of a war was being waged on the rule of law and our constitutional values by this administration, justified by the 9/11 attacks, that I think that political activism was necessary....

BILL MOYERS: ...all wartime presidents expand the powers of the office. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon. I mean, there's something inherent in war and the expansion of powers. Are you saying that Bush and Cheney took it further?

GLENN GREENWALD: I'm saying they took it to an entirely different level. What we have, in the last eight years, is not merely a case of individual and isolated law breaking. It's a declaration of war on the whole idea of a law itself, on the idea that our political leaders are constrained in any way by the limitations of the American people imposed through our Congress. The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist. And that I do think is quite new.

Indeed, it didn't start with 9/11.  It started with Bush v. Gore, with the utterly lawless Supreme Court decision that put Bush in the White House in the first place.  But Glenn puts the problem perfectlty: "The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist."  And there's a term to describe a society in which that happens.  We call it a "failed state."

America today is a failed state.

The country in need of our nation-building attention today is not Iraq or Afghanistan.  It's the USA.
Paul Rosenberg :: [The] Failed [United] State[s of America]
Oh, I can hear it now: "That's ridiculous! Why, a failed state is where there is no functioning government.  Where people just run around looting everything in sight with impunity."

Yes.  Precisely.  That's exactly my point.

"As through this world I ramble
I meet lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen."
    --Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd, The Outlaw"

The problem with the idea of putting "partisanship" aside is that one party is violently opposed to the rule of law.  And without the rule of law, nothing can be accomplished.  That's why they call them failed states.  They are states in which the normal functioning of institutions has ceased.  And the life-blood of state institutions is the rule of law.  That is where we stand today.

It's not that every law in every situation has failed.  It's "merely" that any law in any situation can fail, at any time, for any (or no) reason.

And if any can fail at any time--well then, you don't actually have the rule of law anymore.  You have the rule of pure caprice playing "Mother may I?" with the rule of law.

"Mother may I impeach the President for lying the nation into a ruinous war, defying the will of Congress, destroying the Constitution and upending almost 800 years of Anglo-American law?"

"Yes, you may impeach the President for lying about a blowjob."

In the introduction to the Glenn Greenwald segment, Bill Moyers said:

For all the questions put to him about his legacy, however, the press seems strangely uninterested in his controversial treatment of the Constitution and the Rule of Law: torture, surveillance without a warrant, or prisoners of war, the Geneva Convention and the claims the president has made for expanding the power of his office. That unlimited view of authority may well be the centerpiece of his legacy.

That's another thing about failed states.  It's not just the state that fails.  It's the whole society that fails, and all the institutions of civil society.  Not just the rule of law.  It's the spirit of the law that fails, as well. And when the press cannot even be bothered to note that something is amiss, then we most assuredly do have a failed civil society, as well as a failed state.

Lest we forget what we're talking about here, Glenn lays it out succinctly, with perfect clarity:

GLENN GREENWALD: .... We have a law in place that says it is a felony offense punishable by five years in prison or a $10,000 fine to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. We have laws in place that say that it is a felony punishable by decades in prison to subject detainees in our custody to treatment that violates the Geneva Conventions or that is inhumane or coercive.

We know that the president and his top aides have violated these laws. The facts are indisputable that they've done so. And yet as a country, as a political class, we're deciding basically in unison that the president and our highest political officials are free to break the most serious laws that we have, that our citizens have enacted, with complete impunity, without consequences, without being held accountable under the law.

And when you juxtapose that with the fact that we are a country that has probably the most merciless criminal justice system on the planet when it comes to ordinary Americans. We imprison more of our population than any country in the world. We have less than five percent of the world's population. And yet 25 percent almost of prisoners worldwide are inside the United States.

What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them. But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.

They have license to break the law. That's what we're deciding now as we say George Bush and his top advisors shouldn't be investigated let alone prosecuted for the laws that we know that they've broken. And I can't think of anything more damaging to our country because the rule of law is the lynchpin of everything we have.

And this is what we're like, what we've been like for some years now, before the economy goes into a prolonged collapse.  This is what we've been like when--we were told--times were good.

This is not just a failed state, and a failed civil society.  This is failed civilization--brought to us, of course, by the very folks who spent decades beating their breasts about the DFHs, the immigrants and teh gay and how they were destoying Western Civilization.

The last word here should go to Ghandi.  He was asked, famously, what he thought about Western Civilization.  He replied:  "It would be a good idea."

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[The] Failed [United] State[s of America] | 20 comments
Another quote (0.00 / 0)
"The law is an ass."

At least as managed by our current leaders.

Failed in every which way.... (4.00 / 1)
When I look at my country today and compare it to what it use to be, I am sorry for our children.  How did we ever let it get this way?

They're asking for another four years -- in a just world, they'd get 10 to 20. ~~ Dennis Kucinich  
We Didn't March On The Supreme Court And Burn It Down (4.00 / 5)
Honestly.  They staged a coup in broad daylight, and while a fair number of DFHs staged a protest at the inauguration, by then it was far too late.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
It's Never Too Late (4.00 / 4)
Or it's always too late -- take your pick. Harmony can always be restored; the moment when that restoration begins is always just a heartbeat away, so to speak. In a person waiting in the crowd outside the Bastille, or standing at the bridge in Selma, or sitting on Rosa Parks' bus.

And yet, and yet...one can be trapped forever on the wrong side of history. Millions can, as in Solzhenitsyn's story of relatives of prisoners of the Gulag -- urban people -- picking through an enormous log jam at the mouth of a river in Siberia, looking for names carved on the logs by their loved ones being worked to death at the logging camps upstream. I think too, of the doomed at Auschwitz who kept lists of the dead, passing them from person to person as each keeper in turn went into the ovens.

The most depressing thing about civilizations is how long it takes to create one, how much blood and misery as well, and how quickly it can all be reduced to a shell, and kept there through entire lifetimes of struggle.

If I had a wish for us at this point in time, when I read what Republican senators want to do to members of the UAW, and how much collateral damage they're willing to accept to accomplish that end; when I listen to GG explain the usefulness and fragility of the law, it would be that the people at the top of the food chain, the smug and the suited, should understand the kind of fire they're playing with before they inadvertently set the torch to all of us.

[ Parent ]
they understand (4.00 / 1)
and they don't care.
[ Parent ]
the press (4.00 / 2)
"And when the press cannot even be bothered to note that something is amiss, then we most assuredly do have a failed civil society, as well as a failed state."

I have been railing against the press and media for at least a decade. It is entirely dysfunctional. Wrongdoing, criminality, venality, is not only widely ignored; to whatever extent it is reported it is very often explicitly  approved of in today's press and media; the same press and media that gives garish coverage to whatever crime against person or property suits the sales purpose of the moment.  The once respected New York Times gives yellow journalism a new and deeper meaning as it played a key role in spurring on the unjustified war in Iraq with its attacks and smears against all opponents with the lies of Judith Miller, the prominent play of the dishonest Safire peddling the Atta-Prague story (never corrected or even commented on by the dishonest NYT) and vilifying all intelligence to the contrary, and the inimitable asshole Freidman calling for war for the purpose of kicking ass, any ass, and then replacing Safire with another monumental provocateur, Kristol. The broadcast media, and cable are of course as bad or worse. And the uniformity of the press in its coverage, in the likeness of its thinking means the whole notion and purpose of a free press is dangerously diminished.

I now see that maybe all this despair at this institution is misplace. It is only a reflection of our society. Once it shed light on society's abuses and problems. Now, like the society it reports on, it is riddled with  the same corruption and venality. So with all our institutions. Academia (think John Yoo), the law (think Gonzalez, Mukasey, Bush, Cheney),...

but nobody talks about how to reverse the trend (4.00 / 4)
This is why I don't like Obama's forgive and forget attitude.  I am scared postpartisanship is a get out of jail card.  
Well put (4.00 / 4)
I too watched Glen on Moyers last night and I felt a lot of pride for the new voices that have emerged on the left. It's amazing how much intelligence can be tapped when there is something like a meritocracy--on the internet that is. The rest of the media is a hollow shell.

It is really disturbing to see so many Americans acting as if the underpinnings of our democracy are still in place. By now, most of our symbols are just desiccated images with nothing behind them. I wonder if the election of Obama, a brilliant man and an African-American, is a sign of a rebirth or just another feel-good distraction? Maybe there is such a thing as a meritocracy? That would be a start.

The Great Un-Answered Question (4.00 / 5)
I wonder if the election of Obama, a brilliant man and an African-American, is a sign of a rebirth or just another feel-good distraction?

That's really it, now isn't it?

The workers at Republic Doors And Windows suggest that the ones to answer that question are us.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Exactly (4.00 / 10)
Obama himself is far less important than how the rest of us, as a community, as a nation, deal with these issues.  We, all of us, are truly the change we have been waiting for - not him alone.  This is why the pushback from places like OpenLeft are so important - and why those who counsel "let's just wait and see" deeply misunderstand the historical moment in which they find themselves.

So thanks Matt, Chris, David, Daniel, and Paul, et al - and all of us.  Let's keep pushing.

[ Parent ]
Missed the Moyers show (4.00 / 1)
I'm very disappointed that I missed Moyers show last night.  I didn't know Glenn was going to be on until after it was over.

I believe the show video is available online, but does anyone know if it airs again during the week?

It may (0.00 / 0)
but I believe that any replays are up to your local PBS station.  So, as they say, check listings.
[ Parent ]
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12122008/watch.html (4.00 / 1)
Above is the link to the Greenwald interview. I just watched it this morning on my computer. You can see it anytime. It's always available so you don't need to way for a re-broadcast.
[ Parent ]
Failed states index (4.00 / 2)
Here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

The United States is on the "moderate" list, along with France, Germany, and Great Britian.

Is the United States is a failed state today, when exactly was it a successful state?  In the 1950s, when we had not only a skewed justice system but Jim Crow to oppress minorities, and Communist witchhunts openly conducted by the Congress?  The 1980s, when the President's minions proudly disregarded the rule of law and made shredding documents and smuggling weapons a point of patriotic pride, and the rich looted the S&Ls?  The 1960s, when we were lied into a war, and then tried to extricate ourselves from it by the most heinous war crimes imaginable and slaughter on an incredible scale?  Is a country that allows secret courts to review wiretaps anything other than a police state?

"Failed" =/= "Evil" (4.00 / 3)
A functional state may embody all sorts of evil as well as good, but at least it contains the possibility of redress, however difficult that may be.

A failed state is one in which the mechanisms are so dysfunctional that redress has become impossible.

This is why, perhaps, Earl Warren cited as his proudest accomplishment Baker v. Carr:

Baker v. Carr and subsequent cases fundamentally altered the nature of political representation in America, requiring not just Tennessee but nearly every state to redistrict during the 1960s, often several times. This re-apportionment increased the political power of urban centers and limited the influence of more rural, conservative interests that had benefited from the Supreme Court ruling injusticiable such "political" questions as those of apportionment.[2] After he left the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren called the Baker v. Carr line of cases the most important in his tenure as Chief Justice.

Before Baker, some state legislatures had not been re-apportioned in half a century.  The state legislatures quite literally chose their own voters, and chose to keep the majority of voters without a voice.  There was no mechanism within the state governments that could alter this situation.  Without federal intervention, they were, in effect, failed states.

Of course, the same has long been true for African-Americans, first under slavery, then segregation.  But even though it was effectively a failed state for them, we still managed to make it work, eventually.  But this would never have been the case had the doctrine of states' rights prevailed.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
It started under Reagan and Nixon (4.00 / 2)
Watergate and Iran/Contra were the opening salvos, testing the waters as the case may be. Once those convicted were pardoned by Reagan (and later Bush I) the pattern was set and fully expanded under Bush/Cheney.  

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it." - Mark Twain
Amplifying the definition of a failed state (4.00 / 2)
In addition to the characteristics described by Paul, another key attribute of failed states as they are typically defined with respect to other countries is that they do not collect enough in taxes to run their governments to provide essential services and maintain order and the rule of law.

Here, too, the U.S. can be viewed as a failed state since the federal government has cut taxes on the wealthy (who should shoulder the lion's share of the tax burden) so low that it cannot pay its bills and has to borrow huge sums of money from foreign countries to pay its current operating expenses and make interest and principal payments on its huge national debt.

Not only has the rule of law been finessed by the Bush administration with the acquiescence of Congress, but together they have made the country insolvent. All that has to happen for things to come to a halt across the board in the U.S. is for the foreign financiers who are lending the U.S. federal government money to refuse to pony up any more dough to bail it out.

The fact that an insolvent U.S. federal government votes to give $7.7 trillion to equally insolvent U.S. banks, investment houses and insurance companies by selling even more government securities to foreign financiers while its economy and financial system crash is an absurdity almost too difficult to grasp.

The only positive thing about the current state of affairs in the U.S. is that U.S. voters are watching every move, thanks to the Internet. At last they are getting the information they need to realize the extent to which they have been bamboozled by their elected representatives and their representatives' corporate benefactors who fund their campaigns to keep them in office so they can do their bidding.

The education voters are getting by watching the U.S. economy, banking and financial system go down the tube because of their connivance will soon produce the progressive political revolution that is long overdue.


As Bad As This Is Nationally (0.00 / 0)
It's even worse at the state level here in California, as I've discussed a little bit in my companion diary, "California Is A Failed State, Too".  

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Playing games with credibility. (0.00 / 0)
It's fun to play vocabulary-games that insult Bush/Cheney. They are very bad men! The newspapers suck! We live in a "failed state!"

Let's forget that in other "failed states" you can't drive a car outside the city limits without being kidnapped.

Let's forget that in other "failed states" there's no food in the shops. No schools. No hospitals. No electricity.

This describes about 40% of Iraq and 90% of Afghanistan, along with Western Sahara, Somalia, the Sudan, the eastern Congo, Colombia, and the regions in and around the Golden Triangle in Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.

It doesn't describe anywhere in the United States, and bending political vocabulary to suit the convenience of the moment is just another way to discredit political discussion on the internet.

What does Glenn Greenwald mean with his claim that "the rule of law has essentially ceased to exist" in the United States?

Does he mean that women are raped on the street every day in broad daylight by gangs of uniformed soldiers and police? That's what it means in the Congo.

"The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist." Does that mean that dozens of political candidates and police officials are assassinated in every election cycle? That's what it means in Colombia.

Bush/Cheney and their friends are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to the usual meaning of those terms, but exaggerated misapplication of significant political concepts like the "rule of law" and "failed states" potentially undermines the case against high officials guilty of well-defined crimes, because it contaminates relevant discussion with a suspicion that it's all just an exaggeration.

 

Stuff & Nonesense! Why Should A Failed Imperial State Look Like A Failed Peripheral State? (4.00 / 2)
It's true that the US isn't Somalia, or Afghanistan.  So what?  That's obvious. What's not so obvious is the structural parallels which have an over-riding determinant value over time.

The fall of Britain as an imperial power was surprisingly swift, and much the same could happen to us in an even shorter period of time, given the structural/functional failures I'm writing about--which were not present in Britain.

Besides, when you scratch beneath the surface, the state of inner city black health in many respects is at Third World levels, and has been virtually forever.  For example:

Infant Mortality

The infant mortality rate in Black America (13.6 per 100,000 live births14) -- twice as high as the rate in Cuba and markedly higher than rates reported in Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia and Russia15 -- would rank it 88th among countries.16 The infant mortality rate among infants born to Black women in America is 2.5 times higher than for white newborns.17

And that's inclusive of the black middle class.  In high-poverty inner-city neighborhoods, things are much worse.

Maybe it's not a failed state for you.  Or maybe it is, and you just don't realize it yet.

Finally, you've got this part exactly backwards:

Bush/Cheney and their friends are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to the usual meaning of those terms, but exaggerated misapplication of significant political concepts like the "rule of law" and "failed states" potentially undermines the case against high officials guilty of well-defined crimes, because it contaminates relevant discussion with a suspicion that it's all just an exaggeration.

The reason it's appropriate to speak of a failed state is precisely because the political classes dismiss out of hand crimes that are public and notorious.

What stands in the way of holding Bush, Cheney, Rove, etc. responsible for their crimes is not the Fox News audience.  It's Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
[The] Failed [United] State[s of America] | 20 comments
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