US political system faces “crisis of legitimacy” – Kishore on civic participation, inequality

Tough to summon energy necessary to take part in a system you don't believe in, one comprised of entrenched, corrupt public officials who deliberately fail to serve the public good -- and whom you hold in contempt

Excerpt, minor edits by Carolyn Bennett

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Joseph Kishore 

he character of the American political system is an expression of underlying social relations,” Joseph Kishore writes. And the waning state of “the state and its agents is, above all, a product of” a pervasive, deepening “social inequality presided over by a parasitic oligarchy intent on war abroad and plunder at home.”

People

“Tens of millions of people in the United States have drawn the conclusion that the electoral process is a sham and no amount of participation will [correct or undo] the stranglehold of the financial aristocracy.” In the most recent mid-term election less than one-third of eligible voters – in 13 US states – went to the polls. Among these low-voting states were the three largest US states:

California (31.8 percent), Texas (28.5 percent) and New York (28.8 percent)—along with Indiana, Utah, Tennessee, Mississippi, Oklahoma, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, West Virginia, Nevada, and Missouri.

US youth participation or lack of participation in the process was particularly illustrative of “the widespread alienation” among the citizenry: Among eligible voters aged 18-29, “only 21.3 percent voted” in the 2014 election.

 

Regime

Media organizations, trade unions and pseudo-left supporters of the Democratic Party in 2008 pushed for a Barack Obama presidency “as an agent of ‘change’ and a ‘transformative’ candidate.” Candidate Obama “made a series of promises signaling a sharp departure from the policies of the immediately preceding president, George W. Bush, who had left office the most hated president in American history.”

However, not only were none of these promises fulfilled “but there was never any intention of doing so.”

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he “change” candidate’s performance was a “campaign of lies, reflecting the arrogant belief within the American ruling class that it can simply fool the American people through a combination of chicanery and slick marketing.” And the president in six years “has … presided over the most rapid growth of social inequality in American history, a systematic assault on jobs, wages and social programs, endless and expanding wars, and the strengthening of a police-state apparatus of spying and repression.”

Result

The low turnout figures mean that many—perhaps the majority—of those elected received the votes of less than one fifth of eligible voters. And a cumulative effect of all data pertaining to the recent elections show “a political system facing a crisis of legitimacy.”  

Those who populate the White House, Capitol Hill and the various Governor’s mansions and state capitols have all the trappings of power, but any broad support for this power has eroded beneath their feet.

Approval rating of the combined bodies of the federal legislature (House and Senate) stays around “13 percent,” yet “more than 95 percent of all incumbents were reelected” in 2014. This means, Joseph Kishore concludes, that “despite the nearly universal contempt for the supposed representatives of the people, there is, in practice, no mechanism within the system for getting rid of them.”

Forward

“A qualitative turning point has been reached,” he says. “Millions of workers and youth unable to find any solutions within the established system will —and have already begun to—seek other means to defend their interests, e.g., with strikes, demonstrations, other forms of social struggle. They will increasingly search for political alternatives outside bourgeois politics.”

And “the responsibility of socialists,” he says, “is to actively intervene, prior to and in the midst of these struggles; to develop within the working class an understanding of the inextricable connection between the character of American politics and the nature of capitalism.

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he seething discontent that is building up in the United States in relation to both domestic and foreign policy must be given an ever-more conscious anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, internationalist, socialist, and revolutionary orientation.”

Sources and notes

“The illegitimate US election,” Joseph Kishore, World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org,

November 13, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/11/13/pers-n13.html

Writer Joseph Kishore is National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (United States) and contributor to World Socialist Website (WSWS)

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

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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Fools how many times? U.S. thirty-seventh’s successor skates on cracking ice

Bloom off the Rose?

“When president does it… it’s not illegal” is a lie ─ at home and abroad, U.S. risks loss of credibility, legitimacy

Editing and comment by 

Carolyn Bennett

The U.S. president’s Thursday speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. read as if he were not responsible for the atrocious foreign relations method and model that is being inflicted upon the peoples of the world, including Americans.

The Obama speech, writes political analyst Joseph Kishore, “expresses the deep crisis of the American State ─

…as it carries out a violent and definitive break with bourgeois democracy.

…there is fear, within sections of the ruling class, that the state as a whole risks losing any legitimacy in the eyes of the population of the United States, and of the world.

Guilty but not responsible

“Within a week” of September 11, 2001, the president, easing out from under, said, “Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force.” Furthermore, he said, “my administration began briefing all strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan to the appropriate committees of Congress. … Not only did Congress authorize the use of force, it is briefed on every strike that America takes; every strike. That includes the one instance when we targeted an American citizen, Anwar al- Awlaki …”; but, the president said, “I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen—with a drone or with a shotgun—without due process. Nor should any president deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.”

But this is precisely what the Obama government is doing and has been doing for the course of its tenure.

Kishore points out that the “Constitution requires that charges of illegal activity be proven in a court of law [but] no court has ever determined the validity of any of the (government officials’ or media’s) claims against (al-Awlaki); and therefore, the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011 was unconstitutional.”

But, if the president does it,

it’s not a crime, eh? Where did that pomposity come from? Ah, yes, U.S. President 37, Richard Milhous Nixon: May 20, 1977, television interview with David Frost: “Nixon – ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal’” He was into his second term too. Nixon held the presidency from 1969 until 1974; and when caught in the Watergate Scandal, his Excellency tearfully and with sweating lip chose resignation over certain impeachment. Forty-four exceeds thirty-seven’s Watergate.

JUDGE JURY EXECUTIONER

Global War of Terror

“In the attempt to fit his defense of (extrajudicial, unconstitutional, lawless) killings, the current president tap-dances as in the musical “Chicago”, Richard Gere playing the crafty lawyer. In Kishore’s words, the president “chooses his words carefully”: instead of referring to “‘due process OF LAW,’ as specified in the Constitution,” the president uses the terms “due process” alone, leaving a hole which frees the president and his team ─ (rubber-stamping) “internal deliberations of the executive branch, the president and his closest advisers (without requisite) intervention of the courts” ─ to manufacture what constitutes “due process,”

Kishore says.

I

llegality twists retroactively into “legality”: Kishore observes also that in his Thursday speech President 44 tries “to give his actions greater legal cover” by suggesting “that Congress might consider establishing some mechanism to oversee the decisions of the president and attempt to legalize what has been done ex post facto.”

Muslims protest
USA

That means retroactively, after the administration has broken domestic and international law (“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” – but of course it is illegal) ─ and everybody who’s paying attention knows they have broken the law ─ U.S. lawmakers go back and make what was criminal not criminal for the president and his team.

Sweet deal, eh? A new immigrant slaving in an apple orchard or in hotel toilet or an Afghan, Iraqi, a Pakistani or Yemeni in their own country couldn’t get a deal like that. But there is an air of restlessness in the land. The mask is slipping and the bloom is off the rose.

Okinawans protest
USA

Skating on very thin ice

Kishore notes that President 44 in his extrajudicial killing and illegal detention speech emitted “a tone of nervousness and defensiveness.” The tone “pervaded” the speech, the Kishore said,

…reflecting awareness within the ruling class that what they are doing is not only illegal but also increasingly unpopular.

Significantly, the speech was repeatedly interrupted by a woman who denounced the administration’s policy on drone assassinations and the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Crisis self-inflicted

“The actions of the State, particularly those of the Obama administration,” Kishore says, “have changed American society and called into question the viability of democratic forms of rule.”

While U.S. officials in federal Washington are exporting “democracy” and brutally imposing it on selective Arab and Muslim countries, they are demolishing any remnants “democracy” in the United States.  These people taking the rest of us for fools are graduates of America’s top-notch academies: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago; and if the situation were not so serious, it would be laughable. So president number 44, taking a breather from lecturing other countries and their leaders, romanticizes our fourth president: “America is at a crossroads,” he says.

More like a self-inflicted crisis.

 

“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” the president said.

Tell me again who is waging endless wars of terror against the world including the United States of America.

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he Obama speech “expresses the deep crisis of the American state as it carries out a violent and definitive break with bourgeois democracy,” Kishore concludes. “At least within sections of the ruling class, there is a fear ─ entirely justified ─ that the state as a whole risks losing any legitimacy (indeed this erosion is well under way and deepening every day) in the eyes of the population of the United States and of the world.”

Indeed.

Sources and notes

“Obama offers tortured defense of targeted killings ─ In his speech yesterday at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, U.S. President Barack Obama offered a tortured defense of extra-judicial assassinations, for the first time publicly acknowledging the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, in September 2011” (Joseph Kishore), May 24, 2013, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/24/dron-m24.html

President 37

Richard Milhous Nixon (b. January 9, 1913, Yorba Linda, Calif., U.S.; d. April 22, 1994, New York, N.Y.: 37th president of the United States (1969–74); faced with almost certain impeachment for his role in the Watergate Scandal, Nixon became the first American president to resign from office. He was also vice president (1953–1961) under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Richard M. Nixon, television interview with David Frost, May 20, 1977: Nixon – “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal, “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8

Nixon quote: History Commons, http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a040677nixonnotillegal

Joseph Kishore

Joseph Kishore is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

His memberships, affiliations, contributions include Socialist Equality Party National Secretary and board member. http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Joseph-Kishore/1309816212

 The World Socialist Web Site based in Buffalo, New York, is a media organization that features daily news and analysis written from a socialist perspective; and commentary on the arts, culture, history, and politics. http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Joseph-Kishore/1309816212

World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)

According to its website, “the World Socialist Web Site is published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the leadership of the world socialist movement, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

“The WSWS aims to meet the need, felt widely today, for an intelligent appraisal of the problems of contemporary society. It addresses itself to the masses of people who are dissatisfied with the present state of social life, as well as its cynical and reactionary treatment by the establishment media.

“[The] web site provides a source of political perspective to those troubled by the monstrous level of social inequality, which has produced an ever-widening chasm between the wealthy few and the mass of the world's people. As great events, from financial crises to eruptions of militarism and war, break up the present state of class relations, the WSWS will provide a political orientation for the growing ranks of working people thrown into struggle.”

http://www.wsws.org/en/special/about.html

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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