Let me start by quoting at length from a book by Suzanne Mettler about the post-war transition from Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation.
"As the United States entered the 1970s, the nation seemed ever closer to becoming the fully inclusive and highly participatory democracy implicit in its highest ideals. At that very juncture, however, circumstances coalesced that rattled the very underpinnings of the American polity. Beginning with the first oil shock in 1973, the economy, which had been growing at a rapid pace throughout the postwar decades, slowed considerably. Jobs that had long guarnteed strong wages and benefits to less highly educated workers began to disappear. Over the next couple of decades, lower-and middle-income families saw little real growth in their incomes, while the wealthiest reaped considerable advantage. At the same time, a conservative political coalition began to gather steam, advancing a political philosophy that treats government itself as the problem. Thus, by contrast to those who governed in the middle of the twentieth century, public officials of recent decades have been largely unwilling to use public socialprovision to ameliorate growing inequalityh. Many public programs have been left to wither, and government has become considerably less present in the lives of ordinary Americans, particularly the young. As a result, economic inequality, which had remained relatively low since about 1950, began to escalate and has continued to do so, returning American society to the disparities that marked the Gilded Age. Further, the fault lines of the new inequality have reinforced manyof the old racial and gendered cleavages that the rights revolution had meant to eradicate. Granted, today women and African American men who are highly educated professionals occupy positions in society that would not have been conceivable in the postwar era. For the vast majority, howegver, growing economic inequality has sharply curtailed hopes of equality."
The last five years have exacerbated those trends, with tax cuts designed to benefit the wealthiest 20 percent of the income distribution and program cuts designed to cut into the safety net for the remaining 80 percent. Not unsurprisingly, the United States is falling behind in programs that it should be excelling in, because we are not devoting adequate resources to basic public goods such as education. See, e.g., Fareed Zakaria, We All Have a Lot to Learn, Jan.9, 2006 Newsweek, at 37 (noting that China has increased spending on colleges and universities tenfold in the past 10 years, with Peking University having created state of the art semiconductor fabrication facilities that "outshine anything in the United States").
"Unless [an American is] comfortably middle class or richer, ...you get an education that is truly second-rate by any standards. Apart from issues of fairness, what this means is that you never really access the talent of poor, bright kids. They don't go to good schools and, because of teaching methods that focus on bringing everyone along, the bright ones are never pushed. ... The good news for Ameirca is that the peaks are getting higher. But the valleys are getting deeper, and many of them are also in the United States." Id.
One effect of this growing economic inequality is growing political and social powerlessness. The poor and increasingly the true middle class are disparaged and left without government protections. In this Republican-controlled government, groups with money are able to buy legislation, as super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff now admits doing, see story here and here, in his high-flying days as a lobbyist and power broker. Legislators revel in luxurious restaurants and golfing trips to Scotland, paid for by lobbyists' money, and then follow through by providing political services for the lobbyists' clients. Such cozy relationships between legislators, lobbyists and their corporate cronies, apparently at stake in the case of DeLay of Texas and Ney of Ohio, corrupt the political process and prevent Congress from acting as a check against the power of the executive. The obstruction of justice charges against Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libbey (and the involvement of Bush right-hand man Karl Rove in the outing of Plame as a smear campaign against Wilson) were, it seems, just the tip of the iceberg. There is a climate of corruption that views liberty rights of individuals as meaningless against the backdrop of ambitions for power. (Fitting this trend, recently it was revealed that various administrative agencies track users activities, some even inserting "cookies" in users' computers. See story here. The NSA claimed that its use of cookies was unintentional.)
These changes, and the tightening vise of the neo-conservative ideology on government, have coincided with the development of a "fear society" that has permitted an executive branch obsessed with restoring status to the presidency to grab unprecedented power, cloak government actions in secrecy, and stifle the deliberative dialogue that is the core of democracy. As more information comes out about the covert eavesdropping authorization, it is clear that this White House sees no bounds on its ability to assume power during a time of war, even one of its own creation under misleading rationales. Further, it equates the ever-present struggle against terrorism, which has accompanied human civilization in one form or another since its founding, with nation-to-nation war, and seeks to justify radical departures from civil protections as wartime powers under the Commander-in-Chief authority provided in the Constitution.
The Washington Post reports that the spy programs authorized by Bush have "grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics." Dana Priest, Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor. The administration relies on a small group of legal advisers and refuses to consult broadly with Congress on actions. It claims that "the battlefield is worldwide, and that everything it has approved is consistent with the demands made by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001 when it passed a resolution authorizing 'all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.' "
With this thin claim of support in the law, this administration has authorized illegal secret prisons, extraordinary rendering of prisoners to countries that torture, illegal interrogation techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation that constitute torture, and illegal eavesdropping on domestic telephone calls that violate the FISA provisions for protection of U.S. citizens from government spying, and illegal assassinations. The Post article indicates that George Tenet was permitted to decide if someone should be killed--e.g., assassination of an Al Queda leader with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone--an action banned by law in this country, except that White House lawyers decided that it could be classed as self-defense and not assassination. Id. And various people targeted as al Qaeda officials (and bystanders) have been taken out in that way.
"Time and again the administration asked government lawyers to draw up new rules and reinterpret old ones to approve activities once banned or discouraged under the congressional reforms beginning in the 1970s." Id.
"The Bush administration did not seek a broad debate on whether commander-in-chief powers can trump international conventions and domestic statutes in our struggle against terrorism." Id.
For a sobering commentary from John Dean, Nixon's legal counsel who first warned of the "cancer on the presidency" that grabs for power and coverups represent, see George W. Bush as the New Richard M. Nixon: Both Wiretapped Illegally, and Impeachably.
This series of abuses of power must stop, and they must stop through a deliberative process in which Congress investigates and receives information about the details of the administration's actions here and abroad. It is time for the Congress to act to rein in this imperial presidency. Congress should impeach Mr. Bush, else we will be saddled with an executive that acknowledges no bounds to its powers under the Constitution or the statutes.
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