Empire and Inequality

America and the World Since 9/11

Paul Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317260578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

"This is an impressive collection: well-informed, well-written, covering highly important topics over an impressive range, with no hesitation about taking an honest stand that gets right to the heart of the matter in case after case." Noam Chomsky A frequent columnist in Z magazine, Black Commentator, and other magazines, Paul Street has closely monitored the deterioration of civil liberties since 9/11. In his new book, Street challenges the widely accepted notion that 'everything changed' on 9/11. The event of 9/11 changed the lives of thousands of people in tragic and lasting ways, but some things it did not drastically alter were the long-term goals of the Bush administration. Rather, the terrorist attacks offered a way for them to fully realize these goals, through waging war against fictional enemies abroad and against civil liberties at home. By pointing out rampant injustices in society and doggedly pursuing the blatant contradictions in current government policies, Street reveals a very different America than the government or media portray. Empire and Inequality shows how the jetliner attacks provided a windfall opportunity to accelerate pre-existing trends towards greater global and domestic hierarchy, inequality, and repression. Street shows how the elites of American government and business used classic propaganda mechanisms in pursuit of this regressive and authoritarian agenda in the "post-9/11 era." Street offers a cogent critique of the myth of the powerless state, showing that U.S. government's cup runs over when it comes to serving the wealthy and privileged few and is empty only when it comes to meeting the needs of the non-affluent majority. Empire and Inequality is a powerful reflection on the inseparable, deepening, and mutually reinforcing relationships that exist between empire abroad and inequality and repression at home in the "post 9/11 era."

PART I

Our Tears, Their Opportunity

The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers abroad.

—James Madison, 1799¹

The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.

—Project for a New American Century, September 2000²

Today’s terror attacks were major atrocities…. [T]hat this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom…. In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains…. The prospects ahead are even more ominous than they appeared to be before the latest atrocities.

—Noam Chomsky, September 12, 2001³

Think about “how do you capitalize on these opportunities?”

—Condoleezza Rice, White House National Security Adviser to the US National Security Council, September 12, 2001⁴

Through the tears of sadness, I see an opportunity.

—George W. Bush, September 14, 2001⁵

Introduction to Part I

My initial response to 9/11 combined shock, cynicism, and naiveté. Shock: at the sheer carnage, the horrifying audacity of zealots ready to die and kill en masse and the grisly spectacle of jetliners full of human beings exploding into flames; the twin towers disintegrating. Cynicism: in response to government and media authorities’ claim of surprise at the occurrence of a major terror attack on the United States from the Arab world and especially at official claims that the attacks were motivated by hatred of the supposedly freedom-loving “American way of life.” Naiveté: in believing that the tragedy could spawn either honest debate on the causes of such acts or policies to prevent them in the future.⁶

Though the shock is perhaps self-explanatory, a detailed exploration of my other responses to 9/11, and how those sentiments influenced my subsequent writings, might serve some purpose.

Within ten days of the attacks, President Bush told the US Congress that the enemies of the US were the “enemies of freedom.” He amplified his point by posing a rhetorical question. “Americans are asking,” Bush asserted, “‘why do they hate us?’” In answering his own question, the president offered reassuring platitudes, leavened with a liberal dose of deception: “They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote, and assemble and disagree with each other.” To appreciate the level of dissimulation at work here, one need only consider the tens of thousands of African Americans in Florida who were illegally disenfranchised in the pivotal 2000 presidential election, more than enough to swing the outcome to favor Bush.⁷

But Bush was not the only one offering up platitudes and dissimulation to explain the unthinkable acts of 9/11. His explanations were echoed in myriad forms across the mainstream media. To cite but one example, Chicago Tribune columnist Stephen Chapman, writing one day after the attacks, opined that “America” had “become a target” because foreign tyrants and terrorists were threatened by and jealous of our superior, democratic “way of life.” By Chapman’s estimation, the core ingredients of that glorious American way were “prosperity,” “happiness,” “openness,” “individualism,” and “love of freedom” for “ordinary people.”⁸ Chapman, of course, was far from alone in asserting that the root cause of 9/11 was irrational hatred of American core values. His voice merged seamlessly into a nationwide chorus. Unfortunately, the facile explanations offered by Bush, Chapman, and countless others were intended not so much to elucidate causes as to reassure an arrogant nation that suddenly felt itself threatened by an “inexplicably” hostile world.

Actually, there was nothing surprising about an attack by zealots of Arab background on Washington, DC, and New York City. The motives behind the attack had little if anything to do with the terrorists’ feeling about the nature of America’s internal society. What most bothered them about America was its external policy in and around the chief area of the perpetrators’ concern and ambition—the Middle East. In this the terrorists were not alone—Arabs of all political persuasions have found much to criticize in American policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. If bin-Laden and his followers and supporters were driven by hatred of American freedom and democracy, why were they firmly on the side of the US in the late 1980s, when America enjoyed at least as much domestic freedom and democracy as in the summer of 2001, if not more? And if bin-Laden and the rest were so angry at the internal freedom and democracy of “infidel” Western nations, why were Canada, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Switzerland (to name a few non-Islamic democratic states) right to be much less worried about major attacks from al Qaeda?

The answer, of course, is to be found in American foreign policy. The US government in the Reagan era funded extremist Islam as part of its late–Cold War campaign against the “evil” Soviet Union. The extremists were in some fashion American allies. There is no evidence to suggest that bin-Laden’s attitude toward democratic institutions changed during the intervening years (he hated them back then as much as he does now), which leads to the conclusion that the source of extremist Islam’s current antipathy toward America has nothing to do with Western-style political structures. Moreover, the other “infidel” nations—those spared the terrorists’ vicious onslaught—were hardly lacking in the democratic institutions of the sort presumably being extolled by Bush and Chapman. In fact, in many respects their “democratic” institutions were (and are) healthier and more developed than their American counterparts. What these nations did lack, however, was America’s terrorist record of destructive intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere.⁹

All this led to more cynicism on my part, particularly in response to the ease, rapidity, and confidence with which Bush, his collaborators, and his enablers in the government and media identified “us” (Americans) with “good” and “them” with “evil.” In reality, the terror attacks were all too morally consistent with a long and bloody record of US behavior and policy. Arundhati Roy provides a useful synopsis:¹⁰

The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle…. In the best-selling version of popular myth as history, U.S. “goodness” peaked during World War II. Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the fact that when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government actually looked away…. Drowned out by the noisy hosannas is [America’s] most barbaric, in fact the single most savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping of the atomic bomb on the civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was nearly over. The hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were killed, the countless others who were crippled by cancers for generations to come were not a threat to world peace. They were civilians. Just as the victims of the World Trade Center bombings were civilians. Just as the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Iraq because of U.S.-led sanctions are civilians…. Since the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This list should also include the U.S. government’s covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should include Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed. It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. It should include America’s role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which over one million people were killed. It should include the embargoes and sanctions that have led directly and indirectly to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq. Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War III, and that the U.S. government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists.

At the risk of being redundant, it is worth repeating that the US quite happily supported Osama bin-Laden and his murderous ilk when both were pursuing anti-Soviet objectives during the 1980s; it was during this time that Uncle Sam was also supporting Saddam Hussein, in the hope that his secular, if autocratic, regime could stem the tide of the Iranian revolution.¹¹

Back in the imperial “homeland,” Chapman’s (not to mention Bush’s) outraged formulation ignored rampant poverty, authoritarianism, class rule, powerlessness, racial inequality, mass incarceration, depression, oppression, and misery. It evaded the epidemic negation of freedom and democracy in a savagely unequal and plutocratic land, where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the wealth and possibly an even higher percentage of its politicians and policymakers. It equally ignored related connections between the suffering experienced by people outside America thanks to American policies and America’s hyperconsumerist, ultimately ecocidal “way of life.”¹²

My cynicism was complemented by a certain naiveté, which came in the form of an initial hope that the September 11th terror attacks would provide an opportunity for Americans to honestly confront our domestic and related foreign policy records. A chance, perhaps, to stand down our entrenched psychic and ideological defenses—to understand how and why we cause ourselves and others pain, why millions across the world resent us (many to the point where they could applaud 9/11), and how we might stop the vicious circle of injury at home and abroad. Nine-eleven, I wanted to believe, might initiate a process by which we jettisoned our manufactured ignorance and innocence about how much harm our policymakers and our “democratic American System, capitalism” (as Tom Brokaw described the dominant authoritarian US system of socioeconomic management and hierarchy on 9/11) have been causing others. Perhaps, I hoped, the tragedy would convince us to reevaluate our long-standing sense of special historical superiority to the rest of the world. Maybe the national drama would jolt Americans out of their hyperprivatized, commodified, and fragmented daily experience, replacing neo-liberal societal disintegration with a new sense of civic duty and public engagement.

Well, 9/11 was an opportunity all right, but it was seized primarily by the in-power Respectable Right, falsely termed “conservative,” to exacerbate existing tendencies of inequality, repression, empire, and thought control. It was a windfall for Bush and his authoritarian allies to increase the already outrageous overconcentration of wealth and power at home and abroad and to tar all who opposed this aristocratic agenda as “enemies of freedom” and allies of terrorism. It was used to divert attention and concern away from stunning socioeconomic and racial disparities, spiritual crisis, ecological collapse, declining societal health, chronic overwork, mass civic disengagement, soulless consumerism, and countless other problems that arise from the increasingly unchecked operation of the American System. It was used to privilege the right (repressive and militaristic) hand of the state over the left (social and democratic)—the police officer, prosecutor, and prison warden over the librarian, welfare worker, teacher, and lifeguard. It was exploited to help the White House assault the relevance of international law and the sanctity of America’s own justly prized commitment to civil liberties. It was used to shift the subject away from the need for true democracy, peace, and social justice, and to enable the ascendancy of a “belligerent nationalism” that constructs community on the basis of fear and mindless conformity rather than democratic possibility. It was used by “elites” to speed up the American public sector’s ongoing transformation into a repressive, neo-liberal “garrison state.”

This weak-left/strong-right state increasingly acts as little more than the authoritarian agent of capital’s dictates. It replaces compassion with repression and criminalizes and militarizes social problems that result from the deepening of socioeconomic and related racial inequalities at home and abroad.¹³ It conducts a massive transfer of wealth and power from social programs to the military, even as rising poverty and unemployment wreak havoc on American families and neighborhoods. It utilizes massive tax cuts to further transfer wealth from embattled middle- and lower-income groups to the rich.

The renewed “war on terrorism,” spawned in large measure by 9/11, has “functioned,” to quote Noam Chomsky writing about the Cold War in the early 1970s, as a “device for mobilizing support … for ventures that carry a significant cost, economic and moral.” As with the Cold War, in this new “war on terrorism” (the first one, proclaimed under Reagan, was designed and engineered by many of the same people conducting the current one), “the citizen must agree to bear the burdens of imperial wars and government-induced production of waste, a critical device of economic management.” He is “whipped into line by the fear that we will be overwhelmed by an external enemy if we let down our guard.”¹⁴

In the official public and mainstream (corporate) media version of this apparently permanent war, the virtuous, freedom-loving and benevolent United States engages in a noble effort to protect its own people—and indeed the world—from the scourge of terrorism. This is an inaccurate depiction of what is occurring and what is at stake. The reality is that the Bush administration and its superprivileged clients and allies, who control the world’s leading military and inc...