EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON INVESTMENTWATCH
Found this video of a
guy [George Bush] running for president in 2000 talking about a humble,
non-interventionist, no nation-building foreign policy. Anyone know what
happened to him?
Bush, in a very real sense, never was President.
He signed papers and made dumb speeches, attended events and
had lots of official photos taken in places such as on-board Air Force One
holding a phone.
Cheney and Rumsfeld - both heavily connected to the deepest intelligence
establishment through their international corporate careers - were the ones
putting the papers in front of Bush for signing.
Bush proved modern America does not really need a president,
except to formally comply with old laws.
He was a figurehead, a truly laughable one, and remains a
pathetic historical figure.
Both Obama and Trump are more intelligent, but both, despite
coming from almost different ends of the political spectrum, pretty quickly ended
up as signers, not deciders. All of the speeches and rhetoric aside, claiming
this or that, asserting this or that, have little to do with the realities of
power in America.
I’m not sure anything else is even possible today.
All those powerful and unaccountable good ol' boys are not
having their ongoing plans and efforts disrupted by a mere newly-elected
official with some different ideas, from whatever part of the political
spectrum he comes.
The last president who actually insisted on his authority over
those people left half his head splattered in a street in Dallas.
The American government has created a monster it has no idea
how to control.
It was not the work of any single party or politician but
the natural outgrowth of a set of circumstances with Congress and President
aligning themselves with the country’s vast corporations in their efforts
throughout the world – a world in the immediate postwar period almost free of
serious economic competitors, all of whom had been flattened - and employing an
immense and ever-growing military-security apparatus for the work of putting
other governments in their places.
That massive tangle of resources, elite persons, and
powerful secretive institutions - what I call America’s power establishment -
took on a life of its own and gradually assumed a position from which it cannot
be shaken.
When you consider what America has really become in the
post-WWII period – a vast and brutal world empire having no relationship to
what ordinary Americans like to think of as a government serving their
interests and respecting rules on a piece of parchment from almost a quarter of
a millennium ago – perhaps no alternative arrangement is possible.
Slogans like "drain the swamp" are simply bad jokes
which embarrassingly display many Americans’ ignorance of their own country’s
realities. It all much resembles an ordinary citizen who really believes that the
police and the military are there to serve and protect them. No, police and the
military are there to keep ordinary citizens in line and to protect the people
who really do run things.
Trump, despite a free flow of rhetoric and slogans, really
has little more independence of action than a middling bureaucrat in a gigantic
international corporation.
Again, in the end, you can either have an empire or a decent
country. It is literally impossible to have both.
