In a comment of Booman’s recent post Ho-Hum, Some More Shootings Water Girl asked a question. It’s a magic question, really, and it goes way past the problem of gun violence on the streets of the U.S. It goes to the “gun violence” and other massively criminal acts of the American Empire over the past 60 years or so.
Here’s the question:
So why does it seem that accountability is only for the little guy and rarely for the people with power?
Here is my immediate answer to that question, which turned rapidly into something quite a bit larger.
Read on.
So why does it seem that accountability is only for the little guy and rarely for the people with power?
Is that a serious question? Can you not answer that for yourself?
Mao Zedong famously said “Power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
He was right, of course.
However, Arthur Gilroy not-so-famously said “Power comes from barrels of money.”
Bet on it.
This is not just a U.S. problem; it is worldwide and as old as humankind itself. Is there a way to “fix” it? Doubtful. It’s in the DNA. Some individuals have stronger genetic tendencies regarding the lust for power at any cost than do others and a lucky few have found ways to completely dismiss that tendency but on one level or another, there it is.
When the possession of this kind of power becomes seriously deleterious to the functioning of a society, one of two things happen. Either the society finds a way to control it…legislation and enforcement of that legislation, revolution, religion, whatever…or that society eventually tanks. The fall of Rome, the fall of Nazi Germany and any number of other historical events stand as examples of this idea and so do the eventual failures of millions of power-mad individuals who took their lust and greed too far and paid the price.
The U.S. and most of the other major developed countries stand at an historical crossroads right now. The massive information and technological revolutions of the past couple of decades have created the ability to gather and use information on scales that have never before been imagined. If we allow that information to be used by the power-mad without checks and balances we face an eventual societal failure on an unprecedented level, one that will eventually make W.W.II look like a playground fight. We are already engaged in warlike activities that resemble nothing so much as the Skynet idea from the Terminator movie series….remote-controlled killing machines appearing without warning or the possibility of defense and surgically (or not so surgically as the case may be) eliminating those who oppose the power-mad people whose barrels of money have enabled them to gather the information and technology that is necessary for them to indulge this lust for power. That in turn will produce more opposition, the only available weapon of which will be “terrorism.”
Nuclear terrorism.
Cyber-terrorism.
WMD-based terrorism on any and all available levels.
Which will in turn lead to retributory strikes on the same level from the developed countries.
Talk about a tanking society!!!
UH oh!!!
The U.S. just elected a president whose primary modus operandi is the efficient use of precisely this info-tech system, a man who has in four years gathered so much power that the only major political party standing in opposition to him is now on the brink of total failure. Is he a “good” man? Are his intentions honorable? I would guess that they are, but as we all know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That so-called National Defense Authorization Act that he signed last year? Will he use it to suppress valid opposition here in the U.S.? He says that he won’t and I’ll take him at his word until I see evidence to the contrary, but who’s going to be the next president? And the one after that? Say it’s Chris Christie for example, as a newly-minted crossover Dem. A short-tempered man if ever I met one. What triggers would he be tempted to pull in the midst of a fit of bad digestion some rough night?
Uh oh squared!!!
Bet on that as well.
Back to Water Girl’s question once again.
So why does it seem that accountability is only for the little guy and rarely for the people with power?
“Accountability” disappears when the people are not well-informed because those “We the people” folks simply do not know what crimes have been committed, and the U.S. media are now (equally simply) owned and controlled lock, stock and barrel by those whose actions should be held accountable. I have not often been speaking of the following ideas recently because…sigh…because they are rarely if ever met with any effective degree of acceptance, but I am going to try again because as far as I can see they are the single method left to us to be able to begin to exert some amount of control over the Pravda-like (but oh so much more sophisticated and effective than back in the U.S.S.R.) propaganda network that now controls the minds and thus the votes of the American people.
Here ’tis, folks:
NEWSTRIKE!!!
MEDIASTRIKE!!!
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
VAYA!!!
Dassit.
That’s all she wrote.
The next thing that you will hear from “her” if we do not soon get our act together?
The final song of this little opera, sung by a nuclear fat lady.
Bet on that as well.
It’s just a matter of time.
Let us pray that we have enough time.
Let us pray.
Later…
AG