roachboy

if you take this trend in isolation, ustwo's response is perfectly reasonable.
if you don't take it in isolation, then you have to show why you shouldn't.
i'm not sure that the bush regime, no matter what it has been up to, is adequate as a linking device.

that there is arguably extensive corruption at many levels within the american order is a systemic matter---that this corruption operates without oversight is a function of institution design---and could be interpreted as a prerogative of power as we currently endure/understand it. that this is not acceptable is a political question and in the present state of affairs the options are basically either mobilize within the system to effect changes in design/orientation/policy--but you disappear outside it---or mobilize pressure that can be brought to bear from outside the system via protests of various kinds--in which case you may remain visible to the outside, but probably will be invisible inside the system you are trying to change.

another option is ideology critique.
this simply requires writing and putting stuff out into the world.
it might not do anything.

but the outline of a critique is pretty straightforward:
in a social-democratic model, all this constitutes both political pressure and feedback loops which are brought to bear on the state.

in the neoliberal model, the state is not directly political in the same way, relegated to a narrow sphere of activity, most of which are categorized as introducing distortions in flows that otherwise are self-regulating. it's primary function in neoliberal land is repression, its instruments the military and the police.

in a social-democratic model, one of the central functions of the state is to address the social consequences of capitalist activity, to ameliorate them in the interest of over-all system stability.

in the neoliberal model, these consequences are absorbed into a claim that social hierarchies are natural that the consequences of capitalist activity should be evaluated on utilitarian grounds and that the socio-economic elite gets to control what the utilitarian grounds look like. so the space for political action is almost erased.

so you could argue that a social-democratic regime is MORE democratic and that in a MORE robust manner than neoliberal-type societies--this DESPITE the wider role played by the state in the former--because the space of politics is held open, is understood expansively.

neoliberalism reduces the space of political action, defines individuals as powerless and uninformed by virtue of the erasure of the space for political action--so the neoliberal state cuts itself off from basic feedback loops (like it or not, a political action is both what it says it is and an index of a problem or gap within the existing state of affairs and so can always be interpreted in at least two ways) neoliberalism is an ideology of cut and run, so this is no surprise.

one thing is clear--bureaucratic institutions require feedback loops to be coherent. and you could say that neoliberal suspicion of politics amounts to an erasure of those feedback loops. from this it would follow that the past 30 years of american ideological history have been one long, sustained and disastrous experiment with a particularly dysfunctional capitalist ideology. so this connects the present sorry state of affairs in the states back to the thatcher-reagan period, which saw the rise of a kind of idiot triumphalist take on the end of the cold war and a fundamental crisis of the whole of the political left at more or less the same time. since conservatives never figured out the functional aspects of having a left around, and saw in the left only an Enemy, it kinda follows that you'd find the triumphalist reading of the period blah blah blah. from this viewpoint, thatchers assaults on the uk coal miners is only an idex, but an important one.

so i think in general that the lack of response to mounting evidence of corruption, starting with the bush people and heading downward to the most local levels is a function not of the situations themselves but of the ideological context in which we sadly find ourselves. it seems to me that even folk who would reject neoliberal positions find themselves performing the restricted understanding of politics, its space and its meaning that accompanies neoliberalism. i tend to see this erasure of the political as a nihilist action on the part of the right, frankly--even their boy hayek argued that monopolies do not and cannot know what is happening internally, that they rely on feedback loops---and this was in the end the main motivation behind arguments for free markets--in "perfect competition" price and its history would be that feedback loop. but perfect competition is an illusion--so its correlate lay in the widest possible purview for political action, and a faith in the democratic polity. in neoliberal-land, you do not have a democratic polity--you have shoppers. you do not have political feedback loops becaue people seem to have been convinced that there's no point.

of course, such a system---what we have==gives the lie to basic terms like democracy and freedom--but no matter: the right seems all abotu short-term thinking and when pushed you'll find out that the end times are upon us so that's fine. they'll reap what they've sown.

i was making this up as i go, so it is what it is: not anything terribly worked out, more just thinking through problems. normally, i wouldn't set up socal democracy as an alternative, but i thought it useful to stay within the frame of capitalist-specific options.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite