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Explain Something to Me: Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan
Explain something to me.
In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn't help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States. State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker. The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, "paralyzed" and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything.
Only the other day, no less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, "Washington, right now, is broken." Indiana Senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced recently that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, "The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it." Voters seem to agree. Two words, "polarization" and "gridlock" -- or hyperbolic cousins like "paralyzing hyperpartisanship" -- dominate the news when the media describes that dysfunctionalism. Foreign observers have been similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, "America's Democracy, A Study in Paralysis."
Washington's incapacity to govern now evidently seems to ever more Americans at the root of many looming problems. As the New York Times summed up one of them in a recent headline: "Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis." When President Obama leaves the confines of Washington for the campaign trail, he promptly attacks congressional "gridlock" and the "slash and burn politics" that have left the nation's capital tied in knots.
And he has an obvious point since, when he had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, congressional Democrats and the White House still couldn't get their act together and pass health-care reform, not even after a year of discussion, debate, and favors trading, not even as the train wreck of the Massachusetts election barreled toward them. These days the Democrats may not even be a party, which means their staggering Senate majority has really been a majority of next to nothing.
The Republicans, who ran us into this ditch in the Bush years, are now perfectly happy to be the party of "no" -- and the polls seem to show that it's a fruitful strategy for the 2010 election. Meanwhile, special interests rule Washington and lobbying is king. As if to catch the spirit of this new reality, the president recently offered his vote of support to the sort of Wall Street CEOs who took Americans to the cleaners in the great economic meltdown of 2008 and are once again raking in the millions, while few have faith that change or improvement of any kind is in our future. Good governance, in other words, no longer seems part of the American tool kit and way of life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, the U.S. military is promoting "good governance" with all its might. In a major campaign in the modest-sized city of Marja (a place next to no one had heard of two weeks ago) in Taliban-controlled Helmand Province, Afghanistan, it's placing a bet on its ability to "restore the credibility" of President Hamid Karzai's government. In the process, it plans to unfurl a functioning city administration where none existed. According to its commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, as soon as the U.S. Army and the Marines, along with British troops and Afghan forces, have driven the Taliban out of town, he's prepared to roll out an Afghan "government in a box," including police, courts, and local services.
The U.S. military is intent, according to the Wall Street Journal, on "delivering a new administration and millions of dollars in aid to a place where government employees didn't dare set foot a week ago." Slated to be the future "mayor" of Marja, Haji Zahir, a businessman who spent 15 years in Germany, is, according to press reports, living on a U.S. Marine base in the province until, one day soon, the American military can install him in an "abandoned government building" or simple "a clump of ruins" in that city.
He is, we're told, to arrive with four U.S. civilian advisors, two from the State Department and two from the U.S. Agency for International Development, described (in the typically patronizing language of American press reports) as his "mentors." They are to help him govern, and especially dole out the millions of dollars that the U.S. military has available to "reconstruct" Marja. Road-building projects are to be launched, schools refurbished, and a new clinic built, all to win Pashtun "hearts and minds." As soon as the fighting abates, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has suggested, the post-military emphasis will be on "economic development," with an influx of "military and civilian workers" who will "show a better way of life" to the town's inhabitants.
So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it's becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What's the military's skill set here? What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe's leading experts in good government anymore? And while we're at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation's capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can't do it in Washington or Sacramento?
Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world's leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula, to solve the Afghan mess? Why do leading officials suddenly believe they can make Afghan President Hamid Karzai into "a Winston Churchill who can rally his people," as one unnamed official told Matthew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street Journal -- and all of this only months after Karzai, returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential election, overseeing a government riddled with corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered a discredited figure in Washington? And why do they think they can turn a man known mockingly as the "mayor" or "president" of Kabul (because his government has so little influence outside the capital) into a political force in southern Afghanistan?
And someone tell me: Just who picked the name Operation Moshtarak for the campaign in Marja? Why am I not convinced that it was an Afghan? Though news accounts say that the word means "togetherness" in Dari, why do I think that a better translation might be "crushing embrace"? What could "togetherness" really mean when, according to the Wall Street Journal, to make the final decision to launch the operation, already long announced, General McChrystal "stepped into his armored car for the short drive... to the presidential palace," and reportedly roused President Karzai from a nap for "a novel moment." Karzai agreed, of course, supposedly adding, "No one has ever asked me to decide before."
This is a black comedy of "governance." So is the fact that, from the highest administration officials and military men to those in the field, everyone speaks, evidently without the slightest self-consciousness, about putting an "Afghan face" on the Marja campaign. The phrase is revelatory and oddly blunt. As an image, there's really only one way to understand it (not that the Americans involved would ever stop to do so). After all, what does it mean to "put a face" on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual "face" of the Afghan War, which is American.
National Security Adviser James Jones, for instance, spoke of the Marja campaign having "'a much bigger Afghan face,' with two Afghans for every one U.S. soldier involved." And this way of thinking is so common that news reports regularly use the phrase, as in a recent Associated Press story: "Military officials say they are learning from past mistakes. The offensive is designed with an 'Afghan face.'"
And here's something else I'd like explained to me: Why does the U.S. press, at present so fierce about the lack of both "togetherness" and decent governance in Washington, report this sort of thing without comment, even though it reflects the deepest American contempt for putative "allies"? Why, for instance, can those same Wall Street Journal reporters write without blinking: "Western officials also are bringing Afghan cabinet members into strategy discussions, allowing them to select the officials who will run Marjah once it is cleared of Taliban, and pushing them before the cameras to emphasize the participation of Afghan troops in the offensive"? Allow? Push? Is this what we mean by "togetherness"?
Try to imagine all this in reverse -- an Afghan general motoring over to the White House to wake up the president and ask whether an operation, already announced and ready to roll, can leave the starting gate? But why go on?
Just explain this to me: Why are the representatives of Washington, civilian and military, always so tone deaf when it comes to other peoples and other cultures? Why is it so hard for them to imagine what it might be like to be in someone else's shoes (or boots or sandals)? Why do they always arrive not just convinced that they have identified the right problems and are asking the right questions, but that they, and only they, have the right answers, when at home they seem to have none at all?
Thinking about this, I wonder what kind of "face" should be put on global governance in Washington?
79 Comments so far
Show AllWhy ask all these rhetorical questions?
yes...
if tom genuinely doesn't know the answers to his own questions, he should pause his writing and do some reading...
what's the point of this? these questions can never be answered, as the logic required to answer them is faulty...
government incapable? how about criminal? culpable?
this world has been taken by murderous thieves, and they will dominate until made to stop...they are devising ever more clever technology to enable them to do so...we are working for them to help them do it...
government, and our indebtedness, are their mechanisms for continuing, not our mechanism for stopping them...we must retake common title to the land beneath us...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...all the world's citizens unanimously rejecting the modern world...cessation of industry, termination of contracts...acoustic, agrarian life...local, individual engagement in sustenance and defense...
Yes, the Obama, Congress, the Supreme Court and Federal Reserve are all extremely CAPABLE of and have been successful at transferring the nation's and citizens' wealth from the middle class into the hands of corporations that own them.
While there is no shortage of capability in government, integrity is non-existent.
Can we secede, leaving the Brokers, the Bankers and the Weapon Makers with the National Debt?
Yeah.
Why?
What you have is arrogance and ethnocentrism working in tandem. The US military is utterly unequipped to to deal with "nation-building" actions of any sort. Soldiers are ignorant of the language and customs of the Afghanis and represent the Christian West, sometimes blatantly as they wield weapons with Biblical verses inscribed on them.
Of course, the whole concept of "nation building" grows out of the exceptionalism which the United States has adopted over the course of its existence. It means, as far as I can tell, that other nations are deficient in certain areas we deem important and that we can "help" them fill the gaps. That "help" unsurprisingly (since arms manufacture and the pursuit of war is what we do best) involves the deployment of soldiers and the technology of battle. We are going to learn once again that the world does not respond to this narrow way of thinking. For me, that understanding cannot come too soon.
I have to agree with you, Drosera. This article reminded me too much of reading English colonial history, especially this phrase ""show a better way of life" to the town's inhabitants." It reads almost like showing the "primitive pagan savages" a more "civilized" way to live (your comment re: biblical verses which is akin to the good Xtian Brits thinking).
Quite possibly, the elites of the US have never forgotten their roots?
BTW: "Afghanis" are a unit of currency - Afghans are the people.
No we haven't forgotten our roots. At least a few of us anyway....
Mark Twain's "For He who sits in Darkness" comes to mind......
But then, you said an elite, silly me, I'm just a taxpayer whose supposed to be an active part of this "self-government" experiment that was started in 1776. Unfortunately for real Americans, the "Monocrats and Consolidators" that Thomas Jefferson warned us of have hijacked the government.
Some kind of a way we need to refuse to cooperate at all with anything until "self-government" is restored. A national strike would wake them up...
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
There are some simple answers to these anything but rhetorical questions: the American war machine has no real interest in installing a independent government in Afghanistan -- never did and doesn't now. it's all about oil and gas and mineral wealth. The military has the "skill-set" of occupation.
As for the hypocrisy of trying to export what has proven to be a dysfunctional political system to the world, that's American exceptionism and hubris at work, We are the greatest nation on Earth after all. It is also a touch of racism and xenophobia in taking on the white man's... opps... the American burden of peacekeeper of the world -- while selling the most arms of any nation in recorded history.
All of these serves the needs and peculiarities of the masters -- the super-rich and international corporations of the Military- Industrial-Political-Complex. As do our "leaders" in Washington.
These are well-known answers to anyone whose has been commenting for a while at CD, but there are always part-timers and new readers, so we need to repeat these facts.
The Great Game is rigged to enrich the wealthy, Obama and the leaders of Congress dance like marionettes on strings to the orders of their lords and masters. The "blunders" of the Oval Office are actually carefully calculated to lead us into a right of center position. While allowing the same bozos that crashed the system to rebuild their con-games and scam us once again. because they paid for this privilege with money STOLEN from the American people and taxpayers.
So you see there are simple, if brutal, answers to the questions the author asked to make points. To lead one to the correct answers using our noggins instead of just telling us what he thought.
Gary
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
-- Blaise Pascal
Spot on comment.
It's hard for me to believe that Mr Englehardt is that naive. Is he just part of the smoke machine?
generalcommentator said "It's hard for me to believe that Mr Englehardt is that naive. Is he just part of the smoke machine?"
Mr. Englehardt is neither naive nor part of the smoke machine. I think the use of the rhetorical questions in the article was intended to spur people to think through the issues. He was probably hoping that one or more of them would connect with someone who might see the disfunction at work in our policies, possibly for the first time.
The international oligarchs have the US government right where they want it-- paralyzed and ineffective, and using their well-equipped soldiers to create havoc and "open markets" overseas.
Explanation:
These imperial wars are a fraud.
Now I am going back to the weather channel, where something is really happening.
". . . when [Obama] had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, congressional Democrats and the White House still couldn't get their act together and pass health-care reform, . . ."
I hate to keep beating this horse that won't die but Obama has never enjoyed a supermajority in the Senate on the healthcare financing reform issue. Still, that fact is no excuse for Democratic inaction.
The answer to all of the author's rhetorical questions is and has been pretty obvious: because entrenched interests - Wall Street, the MIC, however one wishes to characterize US corporate villainy - want it that way.
q
Excellent article as well as excellent comments. These observations by Tom Engelhardt should be put forth by our mainstream media. Their job is to ask questions like these in the article and to put two and two together and finally realize that what the government has been telling them has not been the truth. David Halberstam realized this when the military attempted, to no avail, to silence him when he was reporting for the New York Times in Vietnam. It would seem that it is far easier to become and remain stenographers for the government than it is to challenge the tenuous statements that they are given by the military and the Obama administration. As usual, it will be left to a near 90 year old reporter named Helen Thomas to put to shame [if they have any shame] her younger colleagues by asking the questions that her fellow reporters refuse to ask.
And the incredibly cool thing about Thomas's powerful question to the White House bleating dweebs about the Xmas attempted suicide bombing of that flight to Detroit, was....
WHY?
That's all... why? Why would somebody want to do that...? Because he hates our freedoms!????? Those over-educated assholes could only mutter some crap about 'being like that' and 'hatred' etc.
Nothing to do with our foreign policy?
Obama doesn't have the stomach to fire Petreus and McChrystal. He accepts the Bush War premises. Only national bankruptcy will stop the wars.
HOW?S This: (Although BushCo. Gates is really in charge), we now know why Obama chose Biden over Billary for VEEP - he needed an EXPERIENCED White MAN to PLAGIARIZE the presidency of George Bush in successive sequence into the second millenial decade! No real desire for public service "governance".
Yes, excellent questions, whether "rhetorical" or not, they need to be raised.
I have an "explain to me" question of my own that is related to Tom's point about the incompetency of the American government which believes it can impose a competent one on the Afghans:
Given this well-established reality with a consensus of opinion among the American voters, why do they persist in maintaining in government offices those individuals and parties that are ruling so incompetently? A subsidiary of this question is: Why do people who disapprove of Congress (and that's most people) keep electing the same people to Congress? It's virtually impossible to defeat an incumbent member of Congress, no matter how incompetently he/she does the job. Are we voters so devoid of any responsibility for the public commons that we select as our representatives those who we think can do the most "for US" (our local congressional district that is)?
Now there's a rhetorical question for you!
phoenix20,
Because when you watch American Idol 24/7, if you even get up out of your chair to vote, you have no idea who to write in, since you don't know any of the issues or candidates, so you blithely pick the only two printed names on the ballot, who are both vetted by the MIC and the elite as puppets of the Global Empire.
Guys like Ralph Nader never get a printed box. And if the election is close, the Diebold computer voting machine will flip a certain percentage for the right amount of payola.
It's a fake Democracy controlled by CEO's.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Go into an office on the top floor of a very tall skyscraper and imagine that you are a member of the group that created the conditions described in this article.
What is your ultimate goal?
Describe what you intend to accomplish over the next, say, five years.
Most of you are Europeans who were alive at the end of World War Two and relocated to the United States afterwards. Very few Americans know that you exist.
Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, "The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it." Voters seem to agree.
Americans, however, will ontinue voting for Republicans and Democrats, knowing full well both parties don't give give a damn about them and are totally and hopelessly corrupt. The question is why Americans don't permanently abandon these two organized criminal entities?
Mordechai S.
Your excellent point concerning how so many Americans continue to obdurately vote for either a Democrat or a Republican is brought out in the documentary about Ralph Nader called An Unreasonable Man. In the Special Features disc, Democratic apologists Todd Gitlin and whiny Eric Alterman believe that the only way to supposedly affect change is to work within the Democratic party. As Phil Donahue points out, perhaps a third party candidate should seek the permission of the Democrats before daring to exercise one's right to run for office in the United States since it appears that for the Democrats it is never the right time for an independent candidate to offer alternatives for the American people.
USans hate Sugar Daddy because of the way he treats them, but they LOVE the candy he dispenses, so... Sugar Daddy will prevail.
Howard Kurtz and the Post exist to serve the dysfunction. Kurtz can't be nearly this stupid. Perhaps he realizes his own vapid tripe, contributed through the establishment porn of the Washington Pot, only serves to aid and abet "dysfunction." The paper should be out of business after their editor's greasy healthcare stunt last year. (A very real payola scam that was going to get people killed.)
I was active in the New America Democratic Club (a member of the California Democratic Council) during the first half of the 1960s in San Francisco and, when I look back, what stands out to me is how nice everyone was.
Put a nice fellow in the same room with a thug, predator bully and what happens?
Do liberals have to become bullies in order to survive in fields where slashing and burning is going on around the clock and in every corner?
Is civil war on a nationwide scale in the offing?
Will our bodies en masse be added to the flames?
Keep the faith, Leland! :)
The image of a hydrogen bomb moments after detonation defines the growing intention of power in this world.
The time is near when all will clearly understand that to murder one person is the same as having murdered every person in this world.
The end we are approaching coincides, thank god, with a beginning that is coming into being. In October 1981, we entered Humanity's Next Cycle.
When the US military starts using Predators in Tennessee, we will be on the road to recovery.
You know what? I live in Tennessee and have always thought that might be the case. We have the hilly landscape like Afghanistan and the bearded men that might be mistaken for some Taliban. Shit hits the fan and I hit the hills. It may be like Mullah Omar said,
I have two promises on my head. One of Bush who says, you cannot hide no matter where you go. We will hunt and kill you. You will be prosecuted. Your seed will be wiped off the earth.
And the one of Allah who says, He will protect me and give me safety no matter where I go. Which one shall I listen to?
There is no quotes because they are very periphrastic for I read that interview years ago.
In this Mullah Omar sounds like David from the bible. In regard to trusting in the Lord for his protection, I am forced to agree. Not only because Mullah Omar is still out there alive after the entire world has been looking for him the entire past decade, but for the fact that I have found my self in similar situations of hopeless peril and had to give up.
I wonder how long it will go on until people over here are in war over these very same issues for no matter how little we can see it now, we are all connected. Let us hope that war and deaths will not be the case but regardless something will change and it wont unless it is forced by circumstance.
The face is a Death Mask and the intention is never to stop the killing ... until everyone is dead. After all, how can one save this world, except by way of destroying it?
The basic answer to all of Tom's questions: Hubris, fueled by American Exceptionalism. As to why Depravity Central is incapable of governing, it's Depraved--"adj. Morally corrupt; debased; perverted." This condition is caused by the massive influence of money pushed by Special Interests that started long ago, which exists because running for public office is privately instead of publicly financed, an aspect of electioneering conspicuously absent from the 1787 constitution.
Until money is removed from politics and elections are publicly financed and open to anyone wishing to be elected (within the already stated qualifications for office), depraved will continue to be the normative condition of Depravity Central. And since the vast majority in congress and the executive bureaucracy make no effort to change the status quo, we must assume they too are depraved.
Feel free to copy and paste then modify to send to your congresscritters and local newspaper editors. Perhaps Depravity Capital is better than Deparvity Central. Feedback?
Engelhardt sez: "I wonder what kind of "face" should be put on global governance in Washington?"
***
I'm thinking one of those Dick Cheney halloween models.
All this face/mask talk brings to mind an old Biff Rose ditty that now seems eerily applicable:
I'm losing my race against me,
but I'm racing so I don't lose me;
I'm facing a most difficult task -
I'm losing face, but it's just a mask.
What a great recollection for this moment, and you're right, it seems utterly applicable.
really, Tom, what's your problem?
McChrystal apologized for killing civilians --
particularly that truckload of women and children
being moved to a safer location --
tsk, tsk, how awful --
let's try and look on the bright side --
when Ronald Reagan returns on his big white horse,
you know he'll greet all of us with a smile
"..when Ronald Reagan returns on his big white horse.."
As one of the four horsemen?
Are you asking us ordinary Joes and Janes to explain? Very well then, let me drop in my 2 cents worth. The public knows that something is wrong but it still sees the symptom and not the problem itself. Most Americans will not look at or choose to solve the problem itself until the impact forces enough of them to do so. Take it from me. 15 years ago, I was a big supporter of capitalism but today, I would prefer socialism to capitalism and here is why. I used to work for smaller telephone companies until 2000 when the acquisition of the small company I worked for placed me in a large company. In 1996, when the Telecommunications Act passed, there were divisions among the workers. Some of them believed that competition would make them rich, some of them foresaw possible consequences, and the rest like me thought that no matter what happens we will be prepared.
Similarly, when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had started, there were 3 divisions: the aggressive gung hos, the skeptics who feared another Vietnam, and the neutral who thought that let's just wait and see. I sided with the skeptics on Iraq and Afghanistan. The wait and see neutrals I describe are the ones who are kept from seeing what is really happening or they are not sure of what to make of it so they concede to the status quo unless they feel the negative impact and then it is a matter of who will change from neutral to skeptic and who will remain neutral about it still waiting and seeing if something from the sky can be worked out.
I think that the country is feeling neutral and not sure which way to walk next. If most Americans were as well informed and progressively bold as most of us in this forum, I wonder what kind of an explanation Tom would be asking us for by now.
Since World War II, there has been a fluctuating but virulent backlash against all the social programs implemented during the preceding decades in the U.S.A. By the 1990's this backlash encompassed both democrats and republicans. Now, they are almost totally unified in their contempt for public works.
The assumption that these corrupt "Privatizers" see the destruction of the government as a bad thing is to miss the point and the goal.
As this "government" has become the tool of Wall Street and the insidious Chamber of Commerce, the whole planet is to be used as merely a resource for their avarice. We have become a Re-public of sharks. It is consume or be consumed. There is no distinction between within and beyond the pale. This is what they (the vast majority in Washington and possibly, nationally) mean when they talk about "freedom".
Unregulated avarice "under god" (the accumulation of money).
Even something as seemingly basic as a right to an education is now dependent upon a child's competitiveness. That is the source of so-called "Charter" schools (the big push under Obama). The most vulnerable are thrown overboard as if they are just so much useless weight which is interfering with the possible monetary profits of an ever-shrinking pool of "private" dominators.
The key in all of this is that when you hear "Privatization", what is really meant is Privation for the majority and profits for a minority.
"Birdbrain Alley"... that would be this blog here, I imagine?
There has to really be something about the totally ineptness and inability of the democrats in congress AND the white house that has to do with the easy path to elitism and as I am very sure that if investigation was taken to examine these elected crooks it would find not just the repubs but also the dems try to get elected to gain a fast track to the status of elitist by the size of their bank accounts in other countries under assumed names, after all, all those lobbying dollars have to be going somewhere; being a criminal, crook or thief knows no restraints or rules because it is unfettered.
""the U.S. military is promoting "good governance" with all its might.""
Euphemism for 'spreading democracy' to people or country's that don't want it.
That said, it keeps these, ever increasing in number, wars or conflicts in full operation and keeps the 'government' of america in a frozen state of ineptness and the only accomplishments are that the money still keeps flowing into the grand plan of grand larceny.
So bless the MMICC, aka military money industrial congressional complex and follow the money.
The real trouble I see is that I don't think busting up the two party system would help at all.
Parties would simply form coalitions along the lines of right and left and we'd be back to square one.
Mores the case of coalitions along the lines of accepting corporate monies and refusing said bribes.
I'll take a shot at an explanation:
Our government is 'broken' on purpose.
Think about it like this: let's say you wanna rob a bank. So you create a distraction for the cops - blow up a building on the other side of town, keep em busy till you're long gone...
That's what 'they' did - they deliberately 'broke' the government in order to keep us busy trying to fix it instead of catching the breakers while said breakers continue their insatiable looting.
Anytime 'we' get close to fixing something or catching someone - terror attacks, or there's another 'surge,' or this one's trying to murder grandma, or Sarah Palin said something crazy again...
Keep the cops distracted until the robbers are gone with the loot...
Did I mention we're the easiest marks the West has to offer?
But the cops and robbers are in cahoots. The people whose money is being robbed are watching TV. No need to create a distraction.
The gov't might be 'broke' (as in being in hock),but it's certainly not 'broken' as in ineffective. The gov't is incredibly effective. How many billions have the politicians who 'run' the gov't handed over to their benefactors on Wall Street? A lot... a whole f....g lot. That doesn't just happen; these assholes are on the job.
The gov't works just fine. It just doesn't work for us, the people, the taxpayers, the citizens.
RE: "Explain to Me: Fixing What's Wrong in Washington in Afghanistan"-Engelhardt
EXPLANATION: We must fight our 'inner demons' "over there" so as to avoid (or at least postpone indefinitely) fighting our 'inner demons' "over here".
"Why are the representatives of Washington, civilian and military, always so tone deaf when it comes to other peoples and other cultures?"
Because they adopt the attitude that gets them the jobs in high places. The attitude is one of superiority. For the imperial steamroller to carry forth its mission, such an attitude is required. They get nothing out of it except status among their peers, and the wealth and power that feed their appetites. They are not citizens of the world, and not even citizens of the USA, but rather members of the imperial cabal.
I seem to recall a summation line towards the end of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
after all the very involved expositions in his work - he , imo, came down to a very simple conclusion, or at least "moral" observation about the Money Capitalists:
that it is after all about something so primitive - something about power and that it is just another manifestation of people who , by any means necessary, somehow manage to rig the social system to enhance their power and wealth...
but as importantly that this is simply a way of people - in his view - who OTHERWISE might not BE so important or that useful to MAKE themselves feel IMPORTANT - by surrounding themselves with power and wealth .
"...the Money Capitalists", as opposed to the ... Muffin Capitalists? the... Pantyhose Capitalists...?
Just trying to follow your... 'point' here.
And his point is not that they 'somehow rig' the system by any means... His point is that they 'OWN' the system through the hoarding of money and thereby buying the MEANS OF PRODUCTION. Once they own the means of production (land, mill, factory, etc... CAPITAL), they have the upper hand over you and I and we must sell them our labor power--work for the lowest wage that will keep us alive (somewhat better than that in more evolved cultures, but...). And of course, they appropriate the surplus value as profit and have a deep vested interest in squeezing us as much as possible.
As to the incredibly obvious psychological impetus for some people to work hard to hoard so they can become/stay rich and benefit from the immense power that comes with $$$, you're not trying to suggest that Marx wrote a thousand pages to prove that!!!!?????
It's as obvious as the nose on your face. Everybody understands the psychology of the short, ugly, little shit who will do anything to become rich, and then ends up with a mansion, a gorgeous wife with tits out to here, and a bunch of people calling him 'Sir'! Nobody, especially Marx needs to write books about that, except the psychobable industry.
Marx's book is about the workings of Capitalism, the economic system that controls the production and distribution of the goods and services we need to live. And while as a society, we need that production and distribution in common, the system is owned by individuals for their own profit. So their decisions are going to be about their own self-interest, and the common good suffers generally as a result, and suffers terribly during periods of crisis--recessions, and depressions, etc.
You might want to read it again... or just simply forget about it.
THE "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"
UNITED ONLY IN:
inaction towards betterment..
paralysis
Debt
Bubble Economy
WarmakingWarmongering
Joblessness as "normal"
Dropping wages
Scandals
Hypocrisies
War Criminal Leaders
War Criminals and Treason Committing leaders and officials NORMALCY of being JAIL -FREE
Confused "patriotism"
BROKE states
BROKE federal Government
WARSPENDING BROKE government
Blind Love Affair with the CULT of THOU SHALT give MORe to the RICH
CULT of INDENTURING america's children and future generations with DEBT that america will NEVER afford to pay off unless of course america is OK with being wholly owned by foreign governments..right down to your plumbing..
WOW -- "america" is REALLY
the UNITED STATES....