Two opinion-articles in The Washington Post help understand the current condition of the US, an advanced bourgeois democracy. Comments on these opinions are not needed.
The “Don’t venerate or vilify the Founders. Vindicate their radical vision.” (July 3, 2022) opinion piece by Mr. Max Boot, The Washington Post columnist, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, said the following:
“As we celebrate the Fourth of July, views of the Founding Fathers are more polarized than ever before. Some progressives want to tear down their monuments, because so many of the Founders were slave-holders, and they created a political system that denied political rights to women and minorities. Most conservatives, by contrast, still view the Founders as demigods and seek to squelch any criticism of them in public schools — promoting a spirit of conformity utterly alien to a founding generation that joyously engaged in never-ending disputation.
“More than that, conservative jurists who extol the theory of ‘originalism’ insist that the only way to interpret the Constitution is according to the way the Founders themselves viewed it. The Supreme Court has just upheld abortion restrictions and struck down gun restrictions based on the dubious claim to be channeling the Constitution’s drafters, even though many historians disagree with the right-wing interpretations.”
It said:
“Unfortunately, we are now walking back into the darkness. Because of a benighted Supreme Court, 40 million women are about to lose their reproductive freedom.”
It said:
“There is no justice in a political system that gives Republicans six of nine Supreme Court seats even though a Republican has won the popular vote for president only once in the past 30 years. So, too, there is something deeply amiss with a Senate that gives California (population 39.3 million) the same number of seats as Wyoming (population 581,348). The Founders never envisioned such an imbalance between power and population. It undermines any pretense that we are still a democracy.
“We should abolish the electoral college and make the election of senators proportional to population. Let the will of the people prevail. We should – but we won’t. Small states will block any constitutional amendment that would strip them of their outsize power.”
The article proposed steps “to make our [US] political system more democratic and representative.” These include expanding “the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court”; “end the Senate filibuster” system, which “gives a small minority of the population a veto over all legislation.”
Another opinion-article, “Nearly every American has a foreboding the country they love is losing its way”, (July 3, 2022) by Mr. David Ignatius, columnist, The Washington Post, presents the following question:
“What does our national portrait look like on this Independence Day?”
Then, it says:
“Nearly every American, whatever their political perspective, has a foreboding that the country they love is losing its way.”
It again questions:
“How great is the danger of national decline?”
It says:
“The Pentagon’s in-house think tank, which has the mysterious name ‘Office of Net Assessment,’ commissioned a study of the problem by Michael J. Mazarr, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corp. It was just published, under the title, “The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness. [….]
“Mazarr’s disturbing conclusion is that America is losing many of the seven attributes he believes are necessary for competitive success: national ambition and will; unified national identity; shared opportunity; an active state; effective institutions; a learning and adaptive society; and competitive diversity and pluralism.
“[….] ‘Writers and scholars alike … have argued that the spirit of adventurousness, experimentation and determination to remake the future have all ebbed in the American character,’ Mazarr writes.
“He notes polling that three-quarters of those surveyed in 2019 were unhappy about where the country is headed. A 2018 study reported that more than 60 percent of those polled had ‘more fear than hope.’ And Americans across party lines don’t trust our country’s institutions. A 2018 poll registered only 10 percent who were ‘very satisfied’ with how democracy is working; it also found that two-thirds of respondents agree that ‘public officials don’t care what I think.’
“National unity and cohesion are declining, Mazarr believes. [….] ‘A country with a rapidly diversifying population — though it gains competitive advantages from this diversity — will also face greater hurdles to sustaining a sense of coherent national identity,’ Mazarr writes.”
The opinion piece said:
“He [Mazarr] cites the evidence of rising inequality. Between 2001 and 2016, the median net worth of the middle class fell 20 percent, and that of the working class plummeted 45 percent. He notes evidence that in each generation since 1945, children have been less likely to make more money than their parents.
“[….] Mazarr quotes a World Bank assessment of gradually declining ‘governance effectiveness’ in the United States over the past 20 years. It isn’t just a government problem, though. Private-sector productivity has been stagnant for decades, and corporations struggle with bureaucracy and bloat. Universities spend nearly as much on administration as teaching, and administrative costs account for a third of total health-care spending.”
It said:
“I found Mazarr’s conclusions chilling. When countries begin to fail, he argues, ‘it is a negative-feedback loop, a poisonous synergy.’ The energy that could reverse decline becomes sapped by mistrust and misinformation. Some people get so angry they want to burn the house down and start over.”
The observations/opinions made on the US need no extra comment, as these are enough to comprehend condition of certain aspects of the state. The situation stands stark if it’s viewed in the perspective of economy and class.
Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The US Supreme Court has been frantically busy of late, striking down law and legislation with an almost crazed, ideological enthusiasm. Gun laws have been invalidated; Roe v Wade and constitutional abortion rights, confined to history. And now, the Environmental Protection Agency has been clipped of its powers in a 6-3 decision.
The June 30 decision of West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency was something of a shadow boxing act. The Clean Power Plan, which was the target of the bench, never came into effect. In 2016, the Supreme Court effectively blocked the plan, which was announced by President Barack Obama in August 2015. It has been originally promulgated under the Clean Air Act.
In 2019, the Trump administration repealed the CPP, replacing it with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. It argued that the EPA’s authority under Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act only extended to measures pertinent to the plant’s premises, rather than industry-wide measures suggested by the CPP. The ACER vested states with the discretion to set standards and grant power plants much latitude in complying with them. In their decision, the DC Circuit vacated the repeal of the CPP by the Trump administration, and the ACER, sending it back to the EPA. In effect, the EPA’s powers of regulation were held to be intact.
The Clean Power Plan was intended as a mechanism by which targets for each state could be set for each state vis-à-vis reducing carbon dioxide emissions stemming from power plants. At the time the EPA touted it as laying “the first-ever national standards that address carbon pollution from power plants” which would cut “significant amounts of power plant carbon pollution and the pollutants that cause the soot and smog that harm health, while advancing clean energy innovation, development and deployment”. And the plan would also lay the basis “for the long-term strategy needed to tackle the threat of climate change.”
A vital aspect of the Plan was also using “generation shifting”, creating more power from renewable energy sources and natural gas while improving the efficiency of current coal-fired power plants. Such a shift through the entire sector to cleaner resources constituted, in language drawn from the 1970 Clean Air Act, a “best system of emission reduction” (BSER). Amongst its predictions, the Agency projected that coal could provide 27% of national electricity generation by 2030, down from the 2014 level of 38%.
Coal companies and various Republican-governed states litigated on the matter, arguing before the Supreme Court that the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had erred in accepting the EPA’s reading of the Clean Air Act as granting the agency vast powers to regulate carbon emissions.
This entire process struck an odd note, precisely because the CPP had not been reinstated by a Biden administration which intends to pass new rules on power plant carbon emissions. This did not stop the Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow judges from readying for judicial battle. Merely because a government had ceased conduct central to the case did not stay the court’s intervention. This would only happen if it was “absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behaviour could not be reasonably expected to recur.” With the Biden administration defending the methods used by the EPA under the Obama administration, one could not be sure.
Enter, then, the looming, and brooding question of US constitutional law: the “major questions doctrine”. According to the doctrine, one that was prominently used in 2000 to invalidate attempts by the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco, questions of “vast economic or political significance” cannot be regulated without clear approval for such measures from Congress.
The EPA argued that under the doctrine, a clear statement was required to conclude that Congress had intended to delegate authority “of its breath to regulate a fundamental sector of the economy”. Having found none, the agency even went so far as to say that Congress had taken measures to preclude such policies as generation shifting.
For the majority, there was little doubt that this constituted a “major questions case”. The question that exercised the majority, according to Chief Justice Roberts, was “whether the ‘best system of emission reduction’ identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority” of section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. The EPA’s own words – that it had discovered “in long-extant statute an unheralded power” which represented a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority”, clearly troubled the majority. The Agency’s discovery of this power was then used “to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously and repeatedly declined to act itself.”
To this, the majority took clear umbrage. Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act had never formed the basis for rules of such transformative magnitude as that implied by the Clean Power Plan. While Justice Roberts accepted that, “Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day’,” but only Congress could adopt “a decision of such magnitude and consequence.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Samuel Alito, also gave the major questions doctrine heft by claiming it shielded against “unintentional, oblique, or otherwise unlikely’ intrusions” upon such questions as “self-government, equality, fair notice, federalism, and the separation of powers.”
In her dissenting ruling, Justice Elena Kagan, accompanied by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, found that the EPA’s interpretation and position could be contextually and logically justified. Resorting to the “major questions doctrine” was fanciful here, given that previous decisions had simply used the old, ordinary method of statutory interpretation. The decision of an agency had been struck down because it had operated “far outside its traditional lane, so that it had no viable claim of expertise or experience.” Had such decisions been also allowed, they would have “conflicted, or even wreaked havoc on, Congress’s broader design.”
In this case, the Clean Power Plan clearly fell “within the EPA’s wheelhouse, and it fits perfectly […] with all the Clean Air Act’s provisions.” The Plan, despite being ambitious and consequential in the field of public policy, did not fail because of it. Congress had wanted the EPA to discharge such functions.
What is available to the EPA has been dramatically pared back. The Agency can still mandate coal-fire plants to operate more efficiently by adopting various technological measures, such as carbon capture and storage technology. Apart from being prohibitive, this will have the effect of extending the operating lives of such climate change agents.
Justice Kagan’s words, in conclusion, are caustic and suitable for the occasion. The Roberts-led majority had not only overstepped by usurping a critical domain of expertise and policy. “The Court appoints itself – instead of Congress or the expert agency – the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.” Across the US, regulatory regimes – except those approved by Republican and conservative groups – are being readied for a judicial felling by the sword of the major questions doctrine. Federal Agencies, if they have not already done so, will be girding their loins and readying for battle.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
On June 24th, at the think tank, the Hudson Institute, U.S. President Trump’s CIA chief and Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, delivered a 5,000+-word speech, suggesting that America has an essentially God-assigned mission to control the world, so as to preserve freedom and democracy for everybody, and that victory against Russia and China is therefore obligatory for the United States and its allies, not only to serve God but also to serve God’s People, because “central to the economic wellbeing of American families is a United States that leads. It leads all across the world, both in military and in economic power”; and, so, “We must act in concert with our allies to affect strategic clarity, unmistakable to both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China. To do that, we have to strengthen NATO.” Furthermore, “The AUKUS Union [the recently U.S.-UK-created Asian military alliance] should be folded into this expanded security alliance,” so that NATO will become a global alliance against Russia and China, in order to preserve America’s world leadership. His basic argument was that it’s either us or them, and they must be conquered, because God wants it, and we serve Him.
Pompeo did not argue that World War III will entail sacrifices for any of God’s People, but instead that winning this war will be necessary for the future safety and prosperity of the peoples of America, and of all countries that it will be leading, to conquer Russia and China.
The current U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Binken, or even President Biden himself, could have delivered this speech for themselves, with remarkably little modification, because the beliefs that it expresses are mainstream — and not ONLY in the U.S., but also in UK, and even in most of Europe (except for Russia and Belarus).
Pompeo’s personal background is as a fundamentalist Christian whose entire life has been spent in the military-industrial complex and oil industries, and politics. He was first in his class at West Point, an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and cofounded Thayer Aerospace, before entering politics in 2011.
Here are highlights from his speech (including, without comment, its many historical falsehoods, because this is the ordinary way he writes (and extemporaneously speaks). These excerpts are taken from the text that he himself wrote, before he delivered the complete address, from his lectern, at that military-industrial-complex institution, on June 24th.
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America and the nations of the world cannot continue the pretense that the war in Ukraine can end in a negotiated peace, which mollifies Russia. For such a peace cannot be negotiated with Vladimir Putin. Ukraine must win this war. It must win this war decisively if it is to realize peace, independence and freedom. Same goes for Europe. …
This war, Putin’s war, is to expunge Ukraine as a sovereign nation and as a people. Ukraine is to be folded into the new Russian Empire that seeks to become a rump of the Soviet Union. Nine, count them, nine American presidents from each of our political parties. Nine American presidents dismembered the Soviet Empire at enormous great human costs, to allow it to even begin to be reconstitution unthinkable.
Putin’s illegal assault of war represents a planned genocide, which is deliberate obliteration of a people, as defined by the 1948 United Nations. Though each genocide is different and unique as John mentioned, the one taking place in Xinjiang. This genocide that we’re seeing today is like the Holodomor engineered by Stalin that murdered millions of Ukrainians and it must be named to be fought. …
Putin may or may not be ill, but what is certain, what is certain is that he cannot contain his murderous fury. That he still leads a country exemplifies Russia’s decline into the abyss of madness. …
Both a mass murderer and a serial killer. Putin is that. I pray that Russia will reclaim its soul, its country’s soul. But it cannot do so as long it is led by a man who does not evince any concern for the horrific carnage he has wrought, or any concern for his own people.
Putin has this dream, to reestablish a lost empire. If America behaves properly, it will not occur. And we know this, we know that the dreams of dictators quickly become nightmares. …
It is my conviction that America and the West must acknowledge the centrality of hydrocarbon energy to the world geopolitics and indeed to man’s ability, humanity’s ability to adapt a cornerstone of life. …
Had the current administration maintained American energy dominance rather than prostrate itself to radicals, America could have led the way in securing the world’s hydrocarbon needs during this war. But because America’s abdicated this vital role, the war in Ukraine is compounding the pain that consumers are feeling today to cool their homes and to drive their vehicles. …
These nations were unchained in 1991 because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we dare not let any of them be recaptured by Russia. …
I believe Ukraine has found it’s [George] Washington in the embodiment of a single man. His name is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. …
America and the nations of the world cannot continue the pretense that the war in Ukraine can end in a negotiated peace, which mollifies Russia. For such a peace cannot be negotiated with Vladimir Putin. Ukraine must win this war. It must win this war decisively if it is to realize peace, independence and freedom. Same goes for Europe. …
This war can be won if America and our allies supply a range of our most capable conventional weapons to Kyiv. Dauntlessness is needed to end the war in Ukraine, seriousness of purpose. NATO solidarity is essential Germany and France must not defer to any of the Kremlin’s wishes. America and Britain have supplied multiple launch rocket systems. …
We must not give heat to Russia’s false claim that it believes its borders are threatened. This is silliness. …
I believe deeply that the weakness that was expressed in America’s undisciplined withdrawal from Afghanistan was interpreted by Vladimir Putin as a green light. …
As Secretary of State, I built upon my work as the director of the CIA to aid President Trump in formulating concrete terms that would’ve allowed for force reductions and withdrawal from Afghanistan but without the debacle. …
We know China’s intention. It’s intent on dominating global infrastructure development through its Belt and Road Initiative. But this is subterfuge. It hides. It’s a deceit. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a form of imperialism. It is the manifestation of a corrupt intent to entrap less developed countries with promises of loans and infrastructure improvements. …
Every president since Truman believed Taiwan’s existence is crucial to America’s defense. I believe that with all my heart. The 1970 Taiwan Relations Act requires that we maintain Taiwan’s defensive abilities to thwart an attack, but we’re now in danger of becoming complacent. The capture of Taiwan would grant the following objectives to Beijing: it would severely reduce American influence in the Indo-Pacific. …
Our relationship with Taiwan should be reinforced at every turn. It’s become a shining example in Taiwan of democracy, democracy for Asian peoples, and a hope to all of Asia. …
Central to the economic wellbeing of American families is a United States that leads. It leads all across the world, both in military and in economic power. …
I hope that my words today will galvanize American support for Ukraine and for Europe, for such aid is essential if we’re to enforce the national security policies that place American public interest as of paramount importance. …
We must act in concert with our allies to affect strategic clarity, unmistakable to both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China. To do that, we have to strengthen NATO. …
Moving past our current geo-strategic focus, the United States must help in building of the three lighthouses for liberty. These beacons should be centered on nations that have great strife: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They can be the hubs of new security architecture that links alliances of free nations globally, reinforcing the strengths of each member state, in time, linking these three bastions with NATO, as well as the new and expanded security framework for the Indo-Pacific will form a global alliance for freedom. This will benefit America.
“The need for this network of alliances is patent and cannot come too soon. The world has become too small for free countries to not be part of something greater, which will forestall armed conflict rather than react to it. …
The people of America are committed to seeing Ukraine emerge from this war as an undivided nation which will be a beacon to all, to show the world the primacy of freedom, determination, and of love. Thank you, and God bless you. ..
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
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