I am an American expat living abroad. One thing that bugs me about this is that there is a shrill hyperpartisanship that underlies a lot of this discussion. Yes, we should be prosecuting torturers, their bosses, and those who aided and abetted this via existing CIA programs or via extraordinary rendition during the current and last two administrations.
But Democrats won't sign on to something that will implicate Democratic party Presidents, nor will the GOP sign onto anything that will implicate a Republican president, no matter how despised he is by the Republican base.
The result is a lawless government and a strict reminder that there is no such thing as a "government of laws." In the end, all governments are "governments of men."
As an norte american who was an expat for many years I agree. IT's amazing how different the perspective is when you get out of the US media bubble. Nobody, not CNN, not Fox, not MSNBC, etc, none of them really are critical of the US government. It's all whitewashed in a way that's hard to see when you're inside the bubble.
And that whitewash is not just to defend the national government, but to defend the parties.
I believe this is exactly the reason that the founders didn't want to have a party system. Some of their choices (like the original make up of the senate) I believe were specifically to prevent this.
Further, the entire goal of having strong state governments and a weak federal government was to prevent these kinds of crimes.
For the very reason that the federal government will not prosecute itself, a strong federal government is bad. (Principle agent problem.)
Can you imagine if states were doing extraordinary rendition and torture? Highly unlikely. While at the same time, for a real war, there would be no problem fighting with a bunch of state militias banding together (and it would cost us a lot less... much of our problem is due to the adventurism of our permanent military-- hard to justify keeping it around if you aren't constantly finding wars to start, er, fight.)
> Can you imagine if states were doing extraordinary rendition and torture?
The decline of state versus federal power has been punctuated by events that arose because the states did far worse. There's slavery and the civil war, of course, but more recently state governments were throwing black Americans in jail or executing them with no evidence, turning a blind eye to lynchings and hangings and other atrocities. And every time the states proved that they could not be trusted, the Supreme Court gave the federal government a little more power over them.
Eisenhower sending federal troops (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/101...) into Arkansas to forcibly integrate a school would've been decried as a reprehensible infringement of state sovereignty if it wasn't so throughly justified.
Unfortunately the Federal Government was hardly blameless in the racial issues. The single greatest tragedy in the history of race in the US was when the administration of Andrew Johnson rejected Sherman's efforts at land reform in the South. This would have lead to a very segregated South, but former slaves would have had means of production so the segregation could not have been pernicious, as it was (and still is as de facto segregation based on massive economic inequality).
The federal government, effectively, has been a party to the worst of these problems, by advocating for the last 150 years, that black folks "getting a job" will solve the issue. It never has and it never will. Give a man a fish and he'll be back tomorrow, which is why Sherman was more interested in giving them metaphorical fishing boats.
I have now lived in areas where there is a lot more racial separatism than there is in the US. In the absence of massive economic inequality, that poses very little problems. The problems in the US have been racial separatism backed by massive inequality out of the starting gate, something bolstered more than hindered by federal policy (though the states have been bad guys here too). But because we can pick and choose which bad guys we want to condemn, we can imagine that the feds messed up everything or that they saved people from the evil states. In reality there is plenty of blame to go around.
I like the Scandinavian model: most taxes go to the local level and most social programs are run at the local level. Sweden and Denmark, for example, have no national single payer systems (rather municipalities set up single payer systems). However on the spectrum of American politics that makes Scandinavians both far-left and far-far right....
Yeah, the failure of Reconstruction was sad but not really surprising in the greater context of the United States. Huge swaths of the history of the United States pretty much come down to defending slavery, de facto slavery, and maintaining a society which favors whites above others. One of the reasons for the Louisiana Purchase was the fear that France would free slaves in its territories, leading to unrest in the United States; one of the causes of the Texas Revolution was maintaining the rights of the American settlers to own slaves. Avoiding an "imbalance" of slave/non-slave states occupied the country for several decades before the Civil War, and prior to the 'War of State's Rights' numerous laws were passed abridging the rights of Northern States to shelter escaped slaves. After the Civil War, laws were passed in former slave states compelling blacks to enter into contracts with whites which were de facto slavery. Even today, prison labor and racially biased sentencing maintains de facto slavery. It wasn't until 84 years after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that Congress passed laws enforcing them. Even Progressive New Deal programs were racially biased; the original New Deal contained exemptions to Social Security (eg, for agricultural workers) to prevent large numbers of African Americans in the South from qualifying; this was a compromise between Roosevelt and Southern politicians, because he needed their support to fight World War II (Northerners were much more war-adverse and non-Interventionist, and more willing to sit out the war in Europe).
Trying to understand the United States and its history without knowing about the economics and social institutions of slavery is like trying to understand chemistry without knowing about atoms.
A few things that are particularly sad about it are:
1. We learned our lesson, given how we rebuilt Taiwan, Japan, and Germany.
2. We haven't learned out lesson given how the same rhetoric is trotted out by both parties today.
I swear... "creating jobs" is the single worst goal in American politics. Any time you hear it watch closely: both parties use it as an excuse to give rich people more money nad chain people to corporate employment....
It's important to remember just how recent slavery was in the US and how much closer to equality we are now than even just 40 years ago.
Some people that fought in the civil war where alive in 1950, and your grandparents where likely to have met someone that fought in that war and or a former US slave.
I am not sure we are closer to equality on a substantive way. We are closer in terms of where you can sit on the bus. But in terms of property and power, we may be even further away. The KKK's terrorism may be largely a thing of the past, but we now have a choice between the welfare servile state of the Democrats and the penile servile state of the Republicans.
We have had 2 descendants of slaves serving on our nation's highest court, a handful of Congressmen, and not much else. In terms of the legacy of slavery, you really can't count Obama.
No matter what the talking heads on the media say, I still think if you put Al Sharpton, Clarence Thomas, Jesse Jackson, and Ben Carson in a room and ask for consensus and ask them for suggestions to fix the race problem, they will come up with better answers faster than if you put Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in a room.
>But in terms of property and power, we may be even further away.
Given that, at the time, slaves were legally considered property, and not entirely people, I would have to respectfully disagree. You can't get much more powerless than being classified as livestock or furniture.
Wait, you are going from 40 years ago to 150 years ago? Talk about moving goalposts.
Yes, everything follows from the fact that slaves didn;t own productive property and then were forced into a wage labor system where they still didn't. But the narrative of racial progress I don't think follows the nice slope we'd like to think so we can pat ourselves on the back and say how far we've come.
The fact is, prison labor is a new form of slavery in its dimensions and the fact that it is increasingly for corporate profit. We are headed right back to where we were 150 years ago if we aren't careful.
I thought you were answering a comment about slavery with an apparent belief that, in some ways, the situation for American black people today was worse than it was during slavery. I was just disagreeing with the appropriateness of the metaphor, not trying to move any goalposts. I may have misread you.
But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property. Slaves were in many cases property. How can property "own" anything? Can the table in front of me own the things I put on it? Does a cow have any right to dispute being sent to the slaughterhouse? It would have been absurd to even consider in the South at the time.
No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league. Although I would agree with you that prisons are about as close to slavery as we can probably get. But even then, everyone involved is legally 100% human in all 50 states.
No, I was responding to the idea that things have improved in the last 40 years. I am not sure they have. There are some ways in which they have, but in other ways we have slid further back.
> But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property.
Sorry, I was unclear. I am talking about the end of the Civil War and that the wage labor system was billed as the way forward for former slaves, instead of the land reform that Gen. Sherman and others pushed for.
> No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league.
Define slavery for me. I think the best definition is when someone is compelled under force of law to labor for the profit of another. In this regard having prisoners work on jobs that generate profit for private companies, and penalizing those who refuse with longer sentences is slavery. There is no other real word for it. Additionally, as long as convicted felons are then exiled from the polity (unable to vote, discriminated against in private employment, etc), then you have something while, not as harsh as American slavery before the civil war, is quite a bit worse, in terms of denying whole demographics political and economic power, than Roman slavery was.
There are 492 billionares in the US and 1 is African American. So, we are a long way from parity. However, there are quite a few African Americans in the 100+Million club and the trend is vary much tward parity.
We in the US deliberately imported
an, call it, identifiable laboring
underclass, and we're still paying the
price 100+ years later.
Now, now that no doubt we have thoroughly
learned our lesson, certainly we'd never
try or even want to do that again, gee,
never, would we. I mean, we learned our
lesson the first time, right? An
identifiable laboring underclass, who
would want that one again, right?
We've been trying for 100+ years to
get this pot to "melt", and we're
still stirring, and stirring, and stirring.
Yes, this observation is not
totally accurate and has several
loose ends, and maybe we can get
by with it this time, and hopefully
with the orientals we got for the railroads and
otherwise since
we have, but, while I believe I see
the intention, I can't be sure
I can see the situation in another
50, oh, heck, 100, years.
However it comes out, and if we are
going to do it, then I hope it does
work out, I have to suspect that
in some places the intentions are not good.
Or the joke goes, "The Republicans
want the immigrants to work [laboring class] and
not vote, and the Democrats want
the immigrants to vote [underclass
needing welfare] but not work
[take jobs from the existing
underclass].", not that I hear a lot of laughing.
Ah, no one would think
this way, right? And anyone who
suggests such, call it, manipulative
intentions can get some pejorative
labels.
There's a cute Disney movie for children
that has a song "Why Can't We Be Friends";
guess that song is a bit too advanced
for much of the US power elite.
I think the states may be rising in power again, given details like the incredible trouble the federal government is having in getting its Apache helicopters back when it wants them.
Federal inaction was driven by the cancer that was the Southern voting bloc. The Senate shelved anti-lynching legislation, even purely symbolic legislation was killed something like 48 times between 1900 and 1963.
The failure to deal with the slavery issue early on put us in this weird place... We're a people of paradox.
As someone outside the US, when I see someone attempting to frame this as a "states rights" issue I see that framing as adding to the problem by making it an even-more-political-issue than it already is.
I sometimes find it useful to try to keep some kind of perspective with this kind of issue. Realistically all governments have issues policing themselves. I don't think this is unique to the US at all, nor does it represent some kind of break down of the US system of government.
Everything regarding everything government does is incredibly political.
But I don't see this as a states' rights issue directly. It is an issue with a large secret federal government (and stronger states or better yet, local governments, would make that less of an issue). But transferring power from the federal government to the states by itself has no impact at all except making the policies both affect fewer people and the government accountable to the fewer that are affected. That may be a win but it isn't by itself much of anything.
After all, it isn't like the FBI are the ones in the cross-hairs of the anti-police protests...
It isn't just defending the parties. It is defending the corporations who effectively control the parties. In short the media is an important part of the power structure of the US.
Why I read The "American Conservative," "Mother Jones," and "The Nation" more than I read The New York Times.
the corporations who effectively control the parties
While I don't entirely disagree, I'd note that the control runs in both directions.
The only reason that corporate interests steer the government is that the government controls the corporations. By creating regulations that favor a company or the industry, they improve corporate returns. Even regulations that damage a company, but damage competitors worse, may enable rent-seeking and be a good long-term investment for a corporation.
So when the people, aghast at the kinds of problems they see, demand that the government must do something, and allow the government to gather more power in order to do so, this makes more power available for capture by the corporate interests, and so in the long run, makes the problem worse.
But Democrats won't sign on to something that will implicate Democratic party Presidents, nor will the GOP sign onto anything that will implicate a Republican president, no matter how despised he is by the Republican base.
The result is a lawless government and a strict reminder that there is no such thing as a "government of laws." In the end, all governments are "governments of men."