Глобальное правление и стратегическая коммуникация Текст научной статьи по специальности «СМИ (медиа) и массовые коммуникации»

Suchan V.

Global Governance and Strategic Communication

“Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. ... And certainly they will note it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan ... If history teaches anything it teaches selfdelusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.”

Ronald Reagan, Westminster Speech, 1982

“The Vulcans [George W. Bush’s foreign policy team] represented the generation that bridged what are commonly depicted as two separate and distinct periods of modern history: Cold War and post-Cold War. For the Vulcans, the disintegration of the Soviet Union represented only a middle chapter in the narrative, not the end or the beginning.

James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans, 2004

“Skilled and proud Airmen providing full spectrum,

expeditionary, B-2 global strike and combat support capabilities to geographic commanders and the Commander,

USSTRATCOM, while supporting Team Whiteman. We kick down doors and kill targets. Weapons on Target, on Time!”

The official mission statement of Whiteman U.S. Air Force Base, Missouri

What is normal in times of war, in times of revolution?

If we lived in good-old normal time, as we are not, the relations between the U.S. and Russia would be good and normal too — they would be based on mutual respect, adherence to the principles of sovereignty and international law (laws in-between nations which secure them against arbitrary libido dominandi), and good faith.. In a good relationship, there are certain things, which one simply does not do, cannot do and does not even want to do. These are, however, not normal times. President Obama’s 2008 slogan “Yes, we can“ (Yes, we can change the world), has been mocked, derided, and declared elusive, if not even delusory. However, the fact is that we are living in times of vast, tectonic, systemic changes some of

which are willed, while others come out of the blue. Some changes are predictable and can be anticipated, others avoid such a grasp, and the degree of predictability and anticipation is not necessarily directly related to whether these changes have been willed or whether they are spontaneous.

With the onset of the Global War on Terror, the whole world has been declared a relevant battlefield — at least in principle or potentially, if not in fact — and, as good old von Clausewitz told us, every battle, every battlefield comes with its own share of “the fog of

war.” This fog of war is now also covering today’s international relations, the Global War on Terror, and even the sphere of information and the relations between the U.S. and Russia.

In this looming early daybreak battle, the stakes are truly high, that is to say, they are extraordinary. Any other estimate would be seriously misleading and would underestimate the prize. For at stake is the nature and the direction of the whole system of international relations

— in fact, even the very continuation of international relations as such — and the existence and continuation of both the Empire and Russia.

Ryan C. Crocker, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, described the coming future as “an increasingly fraught foreign landscape in a world set afire by war and revolution, a chapter bound to frustrate the best intentions and most sophisticated strategies of the United States.” For, in this world of global politics, “Americans on foreign soil cannot be anything other than strangers in a strange land1.”

In a world in which the forces of war and revolution define the new, emerging antagonism, the system of international relations and power relations themselves are undergoing not only a vast transformation, but a fundamental rupture. “More than the shock of September 11, 2001,” Arnaud Blin and Gustavo Marin say, “the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of a very long period of international history, that of the ‘balance of powers.’ Since this historic event, the planet has been in a phase of geostrategic rupture2.”

Globalization “made in the USA”: From global governance to a global state

According to many accounts, though, our time is an age of ever-increasing and ever more developed management and governance. And global governance has become the name of the main game in town or, respectively, in our shared “global village3.” Rapidly becoming one of the latest catchphrases, global governance is said to signify “governance without government” whereby “international community” creates rules and maintains order without formal governmental structures4. In this theoretical construct, which has also been dubbed a

1 Rubin A. J. Retiring Envoy to Afghanistan Exhorts U.S to Heed Its Past // New York Times. July 28, 2012.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/world/asia/ambassador-crocker-sees-fraught-foreign-landscape-

ahead.html?pagewanted=all (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

2 Blin A., Marin G. Rethinking Global Governance // Forum for a New World Governance. 2007. URL: http://www.world-governance.org/spip.php?article132.

3 See, for example, Dieh P.F., Frederking B. The Politics of Global Governance: International Organizations in an Interdependent World. Boulder, CO, 2010; Weiss T.G., Thakur R., Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey. Bloomington IN, 2010; Karns, M.P., Mingst K.A. International Organizations: The Politics and Processes of Global Governance. Boulder, CO, 2009; Governing Globalization: Power, Authority and Global Governance / Eds. McGrew A., Held D. Cambridge, 2002; The Global Governance Reader / Ed. R.Wilkinson. New York, 2005; Rowling JK. Global Governance. Hamburg, 2002.

4 Weiss T. G,. Thakur R. Global Governance and the UN, op. cit.

“G-Zero World,” no one per se is supposed to be in charge5. However, it is not difficult to see that this assurance has something of the so-called democratic peace theory about it — a pious myth is offered as another form of fiat money which might allow the banker to do the very opposite of what the picture on the banknote says.

The new system is being expressly defined as post-Westphalian — in a sense that both its neo-liberal and neo-conservative architects openly refuse to respect the principle of national sovereignty in the name of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P or RtoP), which carries as its corollary the “duty to interfere” — the unilateral right to intervene. This radical rupture of international law was introduced in 2005 through the United Nations at the World Summit. The responsibility to protect was anchored in Paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document. In practice, sovereignty ceases to be a right and becomes instead a conditional privilege that is granted or withheld by the one sole sovereign — the sole remaining superpower and its willing allies.

NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011 under the aegis of enforcing a no-fly zone has become a textbook example of the use of the so-called R2P. There the U.S. and NATO went ahead and simply read the UN Security Council sanctioned “no-fly” zone as their exclusive bombing-by-flying zone, thus showing that when one agrees on something, that something might be just enough to be used as a blank check. Ivo H. Daalder, U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO, and James G. Stavridis, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and Commander of the U.S. European Command, hailed the support of Libyan jihadist militias and paramilitaries as a great “teachable moment” ands “the right way [of how] to run an intervention,” which “demonstrated that the alliance remains an essential source of stability.” From here it can “get only better” if NATO “increases its role in global security6.” Here, let us also point out that supporters of R2P already considered Chechnya as a case to which R2P, as warrant for intervention also should have applied. Russia’s understandable opposition to such action was then labeled as an interjection of undue, regrettable bias.7

As a general phenomenon, both globalization and terrorism are as old as mankind. However, it is also correct to say that nothing stays the same. Therefore, the right and meaningful question is to ask what exactly is new and different now? Today’s globalization and the threat of terrorism as a continuation of politics by perverse means are interconnected

5 Bremmer I., Roubini N. A G-Zero World: The New Economic Club Will Produce Conflict, Not Cooperation // Foreign Affairs. March/April 2011. P. 2-7.

6 Daalder I.H., Stavridis J.G. NATO’s Victory in Libya // Foreign Affairs. March/April 2012. P. 2-7.

7 Weiss T.G. Military-civilian interactions: humanitarian crises and the responsibility to protect. Lanham, MD, 2005. P. 188.

at many levels. The neologism of present globalization was made possible by the demise of the one and only principal alternative to global capitalism. But the word itself is strange — it is a noun derived from the verb “globalize.” And both as a noun and a verb, the word begs an important, but otherwise unstated question: What is being globalized? Or who is globalizing whom? Differently put, the term appears to be nonsensical, for both its object and subject seem to be missing. Becoming global denotes a change in shape, aspect, or quality, but it tells us nothing about who or what is thus made more in the image of a globe, a ball, or a planet (and we’ve already got one). Had the action been, for example, that of running or breathing (instead of “globalizing”), we would say that we are living in an age of running and breathing. Such a designation would imply that people before us did not run and could not breathe, which, of course, would be much more self-evidently nonsense than what a more abstract buzzword “globalization” is to our media-conditioned minds. But even not-understood nonsense can hide a deeper, well concealed point and thus be one of those proverbial gestures that indicate what otherwise is not be indicated or said out loud — taboo, specter, or nemesis “the name of who shall not be named.” The usual textbook definitions of globalization, of course, cover the missing subject with various “flows” — flows of information, money, capital, technology, and labor. But these flows are at best but provisional surrogates, either covering or seeming to fill the void without telling us much.

The substantive word “governance” in “global governance” — the newly rising star in international relations — might offer us some clue. In essence, while governance is often easily taken as synonymous with management, at times it is also understood as a softer, less blunt or direct, and hence generally more palatable and positive form of government. Yet, strictly speaking, governance too is a species whose genus is the art of governing. In its turn, governing as an art of ruling is tied up with specifically Western conceptions of power. The word “govern” is derived from the Greek kybernao (KuPspvaro), which originally came from the world of sea-faring, long-distance sailing, and navigation; and it meant “to steer,” “to pilot a ship.” Our cybernetics is merely a later relative of such governing, adopted for the purposes of the new information age. Governance, the art of steering mankind, societies, and even distant peoples, implies that politics is a special art that requires both experience and expertise. Moreover, its underlying metaphor of a ship crossing high seas cuts the world of politics into two planes or realms — the lower plane of the hostile forces of nature and chaos (the sea or the ambivalent “flows” in standard definitions of globalization), which may include man himself, and the plane of stability and order — the cosmos of heavenly planets and stars from which a qualified captain (politician) takes his bearings, markers, and

measures. The ship and its crew are then steered from behind — where the wheel of heaven has been brought down to earth as its mechanical copy. Thus, when James Rosenau defines global governance as “the regulation of interdependent relations in the absence of an overarching political authority8,” he is effectively cutting off and obscuring the overarching horizon and true, guiding principle of global governance, that is, the missing mover of globalization, its sovereign, its steering political authority.

It needs to be said that, for practical purposes, the question of the missing subject of globalization is the question of globalization’s key subject, which is, for better or worse, also the defining perspective and the strategic purpose (telos) of U.S. foreign policy and also, therefore, the ruling motive of its strategic communication. And what would that be? It is the U.S. itself, the U.S. rightly understood, which means that one needs to understand the U.S. at least as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who stands in the forefront of U.S. foreign policy strategic thinking.

Under closer examination, even existing American definitions of superpower turn out to be something other than definitions of a global state or empire. More than simply the capacity to dominate over other great and lesser powers is in view. In his main geopolitical statement for the post-Cold War world, Brzezinski wrote:

Hegemony is as old as mankind. But America’s current global supremacy is distinctive ... in its global scope, and in the manner of its exercise. ... The European era in world politics came to a final end in the course of World War II, the first truly global war. ... The winner (of the Cold War. — V.S.) would truly dominate the globe. There was no one to stand in the way, once victory was finally grasped. . The collapse of its rival left the United States in a unique position. It became simultaneously the first and the only truly global power. . [T]he scope and pervasiveness of American global power today are unique. Not only does the United States control all of the world’s oceans and seas ... American vassals and tributaries . dot the entire Eurasian continent. . In brief, America stands supreme in the four domains of global power: militarily ... economically ... technologically ... and culturally. . It is the combination of all four that makes America the only comprehensive global superpower. ... [T]his unprecedented American global hegemony has no rival9. (My emphases. — V.S.).

8 Rosenau J.N. Toward an Ontology for Global Governance, in Approaches to Global Governance Theory / Eds. M. Hewson, T. Sinclair. Albany, 1999.

9 Brzezinski Z. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York, 1997.

P. 3, 5-6, 10, 23-24, 29.

If the U.S. is then “the only global superpower” or the key subject of globalization, Eurasia (the northern part of which is identical with the Russian Federation) is then for Brzezinski the global superpower’s central battlefield10.

A careful reading of standard Western notions of superpower also points to the contours of this preeminent global state looming below their otherwise bland wordings. Thus, according to Alice Lyman Miller, Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, a superpower has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemony11." Paul Dukes holds that “a superpower must be able to conduct a global strategy including the possibility of destroying the world; to command vast economic potential and influence; and to present a universal ideology.”12 For June Teufel Dreyer, “a superpower must be able to project its power, soft and hard, globally.”13 Samuel P. Huntington asserted: “The United States, of course, is the sole state with preeminence in every domain of power - economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural - with the reach and capabilities to promote its interests in virtually every part of the world14'” (The emphases are mine. — V.S.).

Evidently, the grammatical “missing subject,” the key principal of globalization as conceived and understood by American international relations and foreign policy strategists, has been a single state — the United States. And, strategically and politically, globalization (as well as the Cold War) has pursued the key strategic objective of extending American power, reach, and scope, its sovereignty, into global supremacy. As Fukuyama fairly noted in-between the lines, “globalization bears a ‘made in the USA’ label15.”

Conversely put, the U.S. has been systematically recasting and transforming itself as “the first, as well as the only ... and also very likely to be the very last” global state16. Brzezinski also dubbed the U.S. aka global state “the American global system17.” Elsewhere, however, Brzezinski himself lets the whole cat out of the political bag, calling such a global

10 Brzezinski, Z. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. P. 194.

11 Miller L. China an Emerging Superpower? // Stanford Journal of International Relations. Vol. 6. Issue 1. Winter 2005. URL: http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjir/6.1.03_miller.html (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

12 Dukes, P. The Superpowers: A Short History. New York, 2001. P. 155.

13 Dreyer J.T. The Chinese Foreign Policy // Watchman Center. Vol. 12. No. 5. February 2007. Foreign Policy Research Institute. URL: http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/125.200702.dreyer.chineseforeignpolicy.html (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

14 Huntington S. The Lonely Superpower // Foreign Affairs., March/April 1999. URL:

http://users.dickinson.edu/~mitchelk/huntington.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

15 Fukuyama F. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Ithaca, NY, 2004. P. 106.

16 Ibid., P. 209.

17 Ibid., P. 23.

state a “genuinely imperial power” for which “imperial geostrategy” is its “grand imperative” (cf. the book’s title, The Grand Chessboard) 18.

Grand strategy: the matrix of empire reloaded

Francis Fukuyama, another leading U.S. strategist, tucks the political meaning of the system of such a rising global state into three section-titles near the end of his book, State-Building: Governance and World order in the 21st Century: “The New Empire,” “The Erosion of Sovereignty,” and “Beyond the Nation-State19.” The otherwise concealed underlying strategy is then conveyed through the following singular statements, which are scattered through these three sections:

While denying that it has imperial ambitions, the Bush administration has nonetheless articulated, in the president’s June 2002 West Point speech and in the National Security Strategy of the United States (2002), a doctrine of preemption or, more properly, preventive war that in effect will put the United States in a position of governing potentially hostile populations ... 20

[T]he Bush administration’s new doctrine of preemption and war ... depends on the periodic violation of [others’] sovereignty. In fact, the grounds for the erosion of [others’] sovereignty were laid much earlier in the so-called humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. ... Sovereignty and therefore legitimacy could no longer be conferred on the de facto power holder in a country. . The humanitarian interventions of the 1990s led to an extension of a de facto international imperial power over the “failed state” part of the world21.

Here the imperial experience of the 1990s in Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timur should be very chastening. Neither the United States nor the international community has made much headway in creating self-sustaining states . [T]he rhetoric of the international community stresses “capacity-building” while the reality has been rather a kind of “capacity sucking out” . 22

This international imperium may be a well-meaning one based on human rights and democracy, but it was an imperium nonetheless and set a precedent for the surrender of sovereignty to governance by international agencies23.

It is not clear ... whether there is any alternative to a quasi-permanent, quasicolonial relationship between the “beneficiary” country and the international

18 Fukuyama F. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. P. 40, 212.

19Ibid. P. 94, 96, 114.

20 Ibid. P. 95.

21 Ibid. P. 97-97.

22 Ibid. P. 103.

23 Ibid. P. 98.

community. In a sense, the latter has recreated the earlier mandatory system of the League of Nations period in which certain colonial powers were given explicit charter to govern a given territory on its behalf24.

Under the strictures of the new global empire, as Fukuyama points out, “self-defense is made somehow less legitimate than the defense of others” — specifically, less than U.S. — spearheaded invasions and interventions25.

All this also allows us to gain a better understanding of the strategic and political meaning of the last decade marked by the so-called Global War on Terror, whose propaganda reach has even overshadowed the buzzing mantra of globalization. In a nutshell, the global state (empire) declared a war — one that suits its self-defined interests and needs, and hence a global, open-ended, perpetual war, a war without borders and with seemingly contingent enemies or targets. The point, nevertheless, remains that the whole globe has been declared the U.S. war theater — including the U.S. “homeland.”A global state has thus introduced its new imperative and its new face — a war in its own image and likeness.

In a word, strategic communication requires strategy first and foremost, and strategy is defined by its strategic objective, which, in turns, results from how one defines one’s “grand imperatives” or strategically given realities. Often, the emphasis is placed on devising or examining various techniques, methods, and tactics in PR, psychological operations, and strategic communication. On my part, I would argue though that these concerns, however revealing and important they are, remain at best only secondary and tertiary. The strategic level retains its commanding height, from which one can survey and better appreciate the forming but otherwise foggy “order of battle.” It is, therefore, the strategic order that needs to be understood first, before one turns to the engrossing maneuvers of tactical cleverness and showmanship.

Usually, the U.S. post-Cold War geostrategy is traced back to what came to be known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the otherwise unofficial name of the Defense Planning Guidance directive for the fiscal years 1994-1999 (issued February 18, 1992), which apparently was not intended for public release. When brought to the light of the day, this strategic document was quickly seen by many as imperialistic. To preserve U.S. preeminence as the sole superpower, the strategy unapologetically declared unilateralism with its corollary doctrine of pro-active, aggressive wars against potential threats which might or might not become real. Such conveniently broad definitions, or rather undefined justifications for wars to come, did what

24 Ibid. P. 104.

25 Ibid. P. 98.

they were supposed to do: articulate a strategy for the emerging global state, bestowing on it a blank check to use force and wage war anywhere in the world.

Upon initial public outcry and backlash, the Wolfowitz Doctrine was hastily re-edited and officially released on April 16, 1992. Its key tenets reemerged ten years later as the core of the Bush Doctrine (the 2002 National Security Strategy). In its original (Wolfowitz’s) form,

[the] first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power26.

According to this strategy, no one else in the world is to be allowed to even “aspire to a greater role . to protect their legitimate interests.” This “aspect” of the principal strategic objective then requires maintaining “the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role27." The April 16 1992 version explained that “international mechanisms” (international law, the UN, the Security Council, etc.) either need to be subordinated to the strategic demands of the U.S. or disabled. Later, with his typical self-confident outspokenness, President George W. Bush spelled out this implied termination of international law and its mechanisms as we have hitherto known them. Already on September 12, 2001, when addressing the United Nations, President Bush asked: “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant? 28” In February 2003, President Bush repeated: “I think unless the United Nations shows some backbone and courage, it could render the Security Council irrelevant29.” Unless the United Nations does what the U.S. asked it to, it will, President Bush threatened, “fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant, debating society30.”

26 Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival // New York Times. March 8,

1992. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-pentagon-s-plan-prevent-the-re-

emergence-of-a-new-rival.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

27 Ibid.

28 Quoted in Rothschild, M. Bush Trashes the United Nations // The Progressive.

URL: http://www.progressive.org/mag_rothschild0303 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

29 Horrock, N.M. Bush: U.N. Could Become Irrelevant // UPI. February 18, 2003.

URL: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2003/02/18/Bush-UN-could-become-irrelevant/UPI-40421045603145/#ixzz29OJhxgN0 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

30 Fournier, R. Bush Asks U.N. for Help // The Battalion. February 14.

URL: 2003http://www.thebatt.com/2.8500/bush-asks-u-n-for-help-1.1210984#.UHxOk8XA_g0 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

In September 2000, the right-wing Washington D.C. think tank, the Project for the New American Century, published a book-length report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, which was meant to serve as a strategic guide for the next U.S. president. Its introduction affirms: “In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the [George H.W.] Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests31.”

In this connection, Michael Klare pointed out: “Bush and his top aides entered the White House in early 2001 with a clear strategic objective: to resurrect the permanent-dominance doctrine spelled out in the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) for fiscal years 1994-99, the first formal statement of US strategic goals in the post-Soviet era.” The validity and continuity of this grand imperial strategy was also confirmed in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), released on February 5, 2006, in which the administration now “reaffirmed the overarching precept first articulated in the DPG of 1992: that the United States will not allow the rise of a competing superpower32.” This operational “grand strategy” is of cardinal importance. The headlines of the day, however, framed by more palatable “principles” or rather slogans such as fighting against terrorism and rogue states, or furthering the spread of democracy, which are deployed to “dominate the rhetorical arena.” Nevertheless, the real strategic allocation of long-term resources follows the grand strategy, not the politically correct assurances meant for public consumption at a given moment.

Probing the nature and the strategic design of the new global state

The U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks jump-started a dramatic and truly comprehensive intensification of the quest for transforming the U.S. into the first global state whose predominance and exclusive sovereignty was to be locked in by means of global war. As a result, the post-9/11 period saw an introduction of so-called “homeland security” (a phrase whose notorious historical precedents are not lost on older generations of Europeans) and the national security state. In the context of pursuing the vision or fantasy of a global state, the

31 1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance // Right Web. March 12, 2008. URL: http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1992_Draft_Defense_Planning_Guidance (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

32 KlareM.T. Containing China: The US’s Real Objective. Asia Times. April 20, 2006. URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HD20Ad01.html (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

choice of the term “homeland” is both ironic and symbolically potent — in other words, it is a revealing misnomer. The age of a newly openly declared global Leviathan has dawned upon us.

Imposing this shock-and-awe-inspiring, almighty Leviathan by fiat from above required nothing less than an extra-legal change of the constitutional order itself — the overhaul of the legal and political foundations of both state and society. In a word, Washington embarked on a series of variously euphemized and veiled measures attached to various executive orders and bills, which range from the Patriot Act of 2001 to the National Defense Appropriation Act of 2012. The sum of these preemptive strikes against constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and rights effectively amounts to a radical regime change of the U.S. itself. By means of numerous more or less obscure cuts, the official Constitution of the republic has become a proxy for executive will or fiat, allowing imperial executive privilege and power to displace the previous nominal order.

The imposition of this global imperial state upon us is profoundly changing not only foreign and domestic politics as we know it (although the global state itself results from long-trending strategies and developments). The system itself is transforming dramatically all around us in front of our very eyes.

While the global state is being ushered in behind the stated agenda of democratization, good governance, and human rights, its architects see the situation very differently. Brzezinski is adamant about the eventual incompatibility of democracy or even democratic sentiment with the imperial imperatives of the global state:

A genuinely populist democracy has never before attained international supremacy. The pursuit of power and especially the economic costs and human sacrifice that the exercise of such power often requires are not generally congenial to

democratic instincts. Democratization is inimical to imperial mobilization........Public

opinion suggests that only a small minority (13 percent) of Americans favor the proposition that “as the sole remaining superpower, the U.S. should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems.” An overwhelming majority (74 percent) prefer that America “do its fair share in efforts to solve international problems together with other countries.” Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues . More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification33.

33 Brzezinski Z. The Grand Chessboard. Op. cit. P. 210-212.

Samuel Huntington, another leading U.S. strategist, has also been advancing a very similar position, which begins with synonymously painting a “universal empire,” “Western civilization,” “Civilization,” and “a golden age,” only to unveil the flip-side of these terms only for one brief moment at the end of his final page, as new, “unprecedented Dark Ages,” “barbarism” or neo-feudalism, violence, and the lack of culture:

The West is developing, as [I] argued . its equivalent of a universal empire . The West has, in short, become a mature society entering into what future generations, in the recurring pattern of civilizations, will look back to as a “golden age,” a period . resulting . from the absence of any competing units within the area of civilization itself ... and from the extensive government spending associated with the establishment of a universal empire. ... The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is . “the real clash” . The futures of the United States depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization [universal empire]. Domestically, this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. . Culture, as we have argued, follows power. If non-Western societies are once again to be shaped by Western culture, it will happen only as a result of the expansion, deployment, and impact of Western power. Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism. . Westerners will come to appreciate more and more the connection between universalism and imperialism. ... [As] a universal state emerges, the civilization reaches its highest level of Civilization, its “golden age” . On a world basis Civilization [however] seems in many respects to be yielding barbarism, generating the image of an unprecedented phenomenon, a global Dark Ages, possibly descending on humanity. . In the clash of civilizations, Europe and America will hang together or hang separately. In the greater clash, the global “real clash,” between Civilization and barbarism, the world’s great civilizations, ... will also hang together or hang separately.34 (Huntington’s own emphases).

The last words in Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, spell “world war.”

Something similar is also intimated in Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, which, while devoted to the dangers of global warming, has some other, politically even more inconvenient and important truth carefully tucked into the “Introduction.” It is the truly inconvenient truth, which Gore dares only whisper amidst a discourse on global climate:

I also learned numerous lessons about the significant changes in recent decades in the nature and quality of America’s “conversation of democracy.” Specifically, that entertainment values have transformed what we used to call news, and individuals with independent voices are routinely shut out of public discourse. .. At stake is the survival of our civilization . The understanding . about who we really are—will

34 Huntington S. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, 1996. P. 302, 307, 310, 320-321.

give us the moral capacity to take on other related challenges ... the ongoing redistribution of wealth globally from the poor to the wealthy ... the erosion of democracy in America, and the refeudalization of the public forum. Consider what happened during the crisis of global fascism. At first, even the truth about Hitler was inconvenient. They ignored clear warnings and compromised with evil, and waited, hoping for the best. ... Today, we are hearing and seeing dire warnings of the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization35. (My emphases — V.S.).

On the Constitution of the global state

Needless to say, the rising global state is no typical or usual state. In relation to the common norm, it is an anomaly. As such, it certainly belongs to the class of empires than to the family of nation-states which includes most other states, large and small, compared with which the global state is in many ways exceptional. In fact, by its very design and nature, the global state takes exception to the general rule as well as to the golden rule of ethics.

The doctrine of American exceptionalism is the core creed and doctrine of the new Leviathan. This constantly evoked article of faith includes not only a brave new belief in being the exclusive beneficiary of God’s Providence and “the greatest nation on earth ever created by God,” but also, with fiery belief in superiority over the rest of mankind, carries the conviction that normal laws of history (and judgment) do not apply to the U.S. One thus wills oneself to be exceptional, to be an exception, and to enjoy special exceptions from God. As a collective creed, such exceptionalism then becomes a rather typical phenomenon, which is zealously promoted and anxiously defended and guarded even if it means isolating oneself from ordinary piety and reality.

In this respect, by inclination and its perceived need, the U.S. is de facto siding with scholastic medieval jurisprudence, which, in its last spasm, begot the pre-Enlightenment absolutist state. As Thomas Aquinas argued:

A ruler is said to be above the law in its corrective force since properly speaking no one can coerce himself, and the law derives its coercive force only from the power of the ruler. Thus the ruler is said to be above the law because if he violates it there is no one to impose a sentence of condemnation upon him . In addition the prince is above the law because he can change it if it is expedient, or dispense from it according to the time and place36.

35 Gore A. Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York, 2006.

36 Aquinas, T. Politics and Law, in. Princeton Readings in Political Thought / Eds. M. Cohen, N. Fermon. Princeton, 1996. P. 149.

The spirit of this will to power is, of course, inherently paternalistic, as can be well seen from its early modern defense by John Calvin, whose Protestant creed is also a key part of what has been called the American civic religion:

We owe these sentiments of affection and reverence to all our rulers, whatever their character may be; which I the more frequently repeat, that we may learn not to scrutinize the persons themselves, but may be satisfied with knowing that they are invested by the will of the Lord with that function upon which he has impressed an inviolable majesty. ... Now, if husbands and parents violate their obligations; if parents conduct themselves with discouraging severity and fastidious moroseness toward their children, whom they are forbidden to provoke to wrath; if husbands despise and vex their wives, whom they are commanded to love and to spare as the weaker vessels—does it follow that children should be less obedient to their parents, or wives to their husbands? They are still subject even to those who are wicked and unkind. As it is incumbent not to inquire into the duties of one another, but to confine their attention respectively to their own, this consideration ought particularly to be regarded by those who are subject to the authority of others ... Let us, in the next place, consider that it is not our province to remedy these evils . 37

Still, an interesting question arises what constitution, if any, is the best candidate for the charter of the rising global state. In other words, the inexorable question is how humanity is to be organized and reconstituted under primacy, predominance, and preeminence of one nation.

Two good immediate pretenders suggest themselves — the U.N Charter and the U.S. Constitution of 1789. Upon a more careful look, the U.N. Charter appears to suit the needs of the global state rather poorly. Historically and politically, the Charter is the result of a compromise and a temporary balance of power between Roosevelt and Churchill on one side and Stalin on the other. This compromise is still entrenched in the key power organ of the U.N.—the Security Council, the only U.N. body with the powers to make binding decisions on the questions of justice, war, and peace. Russia and China still have there the power of veto, as do the other three permanent members of the Security Council—the U.S., Great Britain and France. The U.S. clearly sees Russia’s and China’s veto powers as excessive, impeding, and, at least in Russia’s case, also as anachronistic. During the 1990s, the years of Russia’s chaos and sickness, the U.S. and its allies succeeded on a number of occasions in enlisting Russia in support of their crusades against the Serbs, then the last or possibly the only Russian ally in Europe. However, it has become evident that the U.S. can no longer

37 Calvin J. God and Political Duty, in Princeton Readings in Political Thought / Eds. M. Cohen, N. Fermon. Princeton, 1996. Pp. 203-204.

count on such “constructive” self-abnegation by Russia in the interest of the U.S. and NATO’s further aggressive expansion of the global state.

Moreover, since the U.N. Charter reflects the time of its making—the balance of power at the end of World War II — much of its architecture (the Security Council excepted) is based on the principles of state sovereignty, equality (and even “sovereign equality”), and self-determination. The U.N. Charter even proscribes aggression (Chapter 1, Article 1.1.) and also “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” (Chapter 1, Article 2.4), a clause which the global state has treated from the start as non-existent.

By default, the U.S. Constitution would then seem to be the right candidate for the constitution of the global state. It names some of the key decision centers of the U.S. government and also includes, as a price for its ratification, a key addition or “amendment” known as the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments). However, it has been noted by many that, after 9/11, the U.S. Constitution or, rather more precisely, the constitutional rights and freedoms of the citizens, which are anchored chiefly in the first ten amendments, have been in many ways disabled or significantly weakened by the sustained and combined onslaught of all three major branches of the U.S. government — chiefly by the imperial executive, although both Congress and the Supreme Court have played their part in infringing on citizens’ rights. Even the Republicans, whose party is otherwise tied very closely to the “national security” establishment of the global state, share the view that the Constitution has been undermined and hollowed out, and that rights and freedoms have been lost. But like a devil who cannot help inventing yet another devil whom he is free to blame and hate, they blame it on the Democrats and the specter of fictitious socialism. This schizophrenia and cognitive dissonance adds quite a bit to the ironic and tragic character of our time. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have fought tooth and nail against the good old notion of justice and citizen liberties in order arbitrarily to dispense with (and dispose of) both citizens and noncitizens without trial, charge, proof, evidence, or conviction, indefinitely and as they please. In political theory, this signature policy is known as a symptom of tyranny. So what constitution, if any, can a tyranny have?

As long as constitution means the rule of law and the equality of all before the law, tyranny must be defined either as an anti-constitutional regime or, at least, somewhat euphemistically, as a post-constitutional regime, or else described, in Leo Strauss’ words, as “that permanent absolute rule that is truly necessary,” yet “too subtle for ordinary political use.” For, as Leo Strauss, the godfather of the American neo-conservatives, argued, “it is

better for the people to remain ignorant of that distinction ... Caesars can take care of themselves.”38 Or, as John Locke famously put it in his adage, “whereever law ends, tyranny begins” (Second Treatise of Government, Chapter XVIII, sec. 202). This is also why, in the U.S. itself, the rise of the global state coincided with the rediscovery and rehabilitation of the work of the leading Nazi constitutional theorist, Carl Schmitt, especially his vision of the post-constitutional state as “the state of exception.” In his magnum opus, The Constitutional Theory (1928), Carl Schmitt wrote in the spirit of the high new sophism which paved the way to the post-constitutional fascist order:

Constitutional laws, by contrast, can be suspended during the state of exception and be violated by measures of the state of exception . the President is empowered to issue such measures, and the basic rights . can be set aside temporarily . Therefore, it would be nonsensical to render every single constitutional law inviolable because the constitution is inviolable and to see in every single constitutional provision an insurmountable obstacle to the protection of the constitution in general. ... [however] more extensive, indefinable intrusions become necessary for the case of the state of exception, the possibility of a suspension, or the temporary setting aside of the basic rights . The protection of bourgeois freedom ensured by the recognition of basic rights exhausts itself . The superiority of the basic rights over constitutional laws is certainly obscured ... [A]n analogous lack of clarity is evident in the basic rights of the federal constitution of the United States of America ... For the case of extraordinary endangerment of state security and order, it is necessary to have a special type of regulation that eliminates constitutional bonds and that has led to the elaboration of legal concepts such as state of war, state of siege, and state of exception39.

In other words, in the guise of the Global War on Terror, the global state has ushered in an imposition of its own post-constitutional state and regime — a state of war conceived as a global and perpetual war. And, at the end of its trajectory, the ideology of American exceptionalism has begotten its own political form — its own Schmittian “state of exception.” Under the guise of the same state of exception, Hitler carried out a radical regime change. Giorgio Agamben noted:

No sooner did Hitler take power (or, as we should perhaps more accurately say, no sooner was power given to him),”, “than, on February 28, he proclaimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties. The decree was never repealed, so that from a juridical standpoint the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined

38 Voegelin E. Review of Strauss’ On Tyranny, and Strauss, L. Response to Voegelin’s Review: Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” // Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964 / Eds. P. Emberley, B. Cooper. Columbia-London, 2004. P. 44-57.

39 Schmitt C. Constitutional Theory. Durham-London, 2008. P. 81, 214-215, 217.

as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system [or fascism]. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones. Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a “global civil war,” the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. ... [in President Bush’s conception of the state of exception] the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible. . Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally—nevertheless still claims to be applying the law. . [T]he state of exception . [is] the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war40.

There is, however, yet another serious candidate for the constitution of the global state. It is the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, which, instead of the Constitution itself, Abraham Lincoln invoked in his famous Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1683 as the real political founding program for a “new birth of freedom” and the re-consecration of the state in the midst of the “great civil war” over the question of slavery and the destiny of the Union. Indeed, in American political discourse, the Declaration of Independence and its proposition that all men are created equal continues to be hailed as the defining act of the new nation and its mission in the world. Together with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the original text of the Declaration of Independence is held in the temple-like atmosphere of the central Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington D.C. What is striking and also curious (but what is otherwise hardly ever noted) is that the numerous citations of the Declaration are, as a rule, reduced to the various portions of the first sentence of the text’s second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In reality, the Declaration of Independence tells much more. But, first and foremost, as the opening paragraph says, it is a declaration of war as a way “to dissolve the political bands which have connected [one people] another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station .” One must note with mordant irony that the phraseology of “separate and equal” came later to be used in toto as the legal justification of racial apartheid, which succeeded the regime of direct slavery.

40 Agamben G. State of Exception Kevin Attell trans. Chicago-London, 2005. P. 2, 22, 87.

Importantly, the Declaration also gives reasons and justifications for the war. First, it accuses the British monarch, the hapless George III, of “despotism” and “absolute tyranny,” thus setting the defining precedents for how staple justifications of numerous uses of force abroad were to be framed — as a self-evidently justified struggle of freedom against dictators and tyrants.

After this propagandistic salvo, the Declaration goes into the other, politically more salient and more pragmatic reasons behind the decision to go to war. And, notably, these reasons directly belie the profession of the principle of equality and the creed of inalienable rights. First, King George III is accused of obstructing what could be called today illegal immigration: “He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.” Furthermore, the British are accused of being too lenient and too compromising with the French and the Catholics on the Canadian territories, which was seen as tantamount to forestalling expansion of the American colonies there. The relatively free and tolerant administration of Canada and accommodation of Catholics there is denounced as “the establishment of an arbitrary government.” Thus, the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress of October 14, 1774, held that the establishment of the province of Quebec by the British Crown was “impolitic, unjust, and cruel, as well as unconstitutional, and destructive of American rights” and that “establishing the Roman Catholic religion in the province of Quebec” amounted to “erecting a tyranny there [and] to the great danger, from so total a dissimilarity of religion, law, and government ...” Similarly, the Articles of Confederation of 1778 include Article XI, which promulgates the annexation of Canada by the U.S.

The Declaration also collectively accuses the Natives of the crime of total war — “the merciless Indian savages” have but one “known rule of warfare [which] is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” The genocide of the Native population thus became a foregone conclusion, by virtue of pinning on the victims the charge of genocidal warfare. The British monarchy is presented as an accomplice in the Natives’ terrorism. In its conclusion, the Declaration explains that the colonists wanted above all to have a free hand or absolute power in matters of war and peace, and to be “totally” independent of the unduly restraining policies of the British crown. It can be surmised therefore that from the outset it has been the desire for absolute freedom to make war, hidden behind appeals to natural equality for all, has been a decisive motive and aspiration of the new Republic — this new, ground-breaking political experiment.

Both the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter (which follows the former in this) begin with the proud words, “We the people[s] .” But the global state being a Leviathan by design, is a body of people incorporated into the state’s body through the self-alienation of their own powers, judgment and natural freedoms. The regime is corporatist. In this respect, the U.S. itself made a decisive step towards leaving no further doubt in this respect when, on January 21, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations or legal fictions are persons, entitled by the (truncated) U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run government, that money is speech and that money as speech must be unlimited and, in its unlimited power, protected by all the powers vested in the state, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. In a nutshell, the Supreme Court ruled that fictions are people and that people as fictions are money, which, in this day and age, means fiat money. The practical formula of how to operationalize the global state and how to change at last the meaning of “we the people” has thus been made and certified by the supreme act of this judicial fiat. The spreading epidemic of political fiat as a means of rule and how to do politics has thus at last publicly declared the identity of political fiat with its fair half — fiat money and corporate power.

For ordinary people, that is, for most people below the 1-10 percent of the wealthiest, fiat money spells out debt and means debt, their bondage, by means of their government’s administrative fiats or arbitrary decisions. In other words, fiat money is the power to charge and tax people — arbitrarily, by fiat, and this power is shared between the state and banks and corporations.

In order to function, such power, while shared, still must be exercised exclusively as a legal (and extra-legal and extra-constitutional) privilege. Briefly put, fiat money is plutocracy helped by technology, updated sophism, and the lack of political and economic education beyond the walls of its Babylonian towers and elitist schools. After all, already in the 1778 Articles of Confederation, the poor (“paupers”) were excepted from “free inhabitants . [and from all privileges and immunities of free citizens.”

The government makes debt or helps create and keep one, and the debt is then passed on to the people as their own collective and individual liabilities, which as such are then enforced and policed by the might of the state. People become money which they owe in order to live. By definition, fiat money also means astronomic surpluses of money or potentially unlimited demands on what people have. Fiat money is thus also highly inflationary. But the inflation never spreads equally to all. For ordinary people, the inflationary pressures of fiat money are greatly modified by the large surpluses of their

employable labor, taxations, built-in systemic inequalities, and state-organized statistics. Fiat money not only stands between the people and reality as a powerful, though at times crumbling wall of the Platonic Cave, it also shields the state and the corporations from reality, reckoning and their own criminal liability. The financial bailouts, which started to be administered to debt-ridden nations from the early 1990s on, are bailouts for the creditors, the sorcerers of fiat money, and for the system of common bondage through debt. Whenever the debts’ house of cards is about to fall, ever greater bailouts prop up the teetering structure and prolong its parasitic existence.

While Chrystia Freeland has argued that U.S. billionaires supposedly have needed to “feel victimized” under the last four years of the President Obama administration (i.e., “the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass”!), she cites striking evidence of the lopsided gains drawn by the richest from the current economic recession and malaise:

Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar tarp rescue package for Wall Street. ... The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners. ... [T]he top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each. Notwithstanding Occupy Wall Street’s focus on the “one per cent,” or Obama’s choice of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as the level at which taxes on family income should rise, the salient dividing line between rich and not rich is much higher up the income-distribution scale. Hostility toward the President is particularly strident among the ultra-rich. This is the group that has benefitted most from the winner-take-all economy: the 0.1 per cent, whose share of the national income was 7.8 per cent in 2009, according to I.R.S. data. Moreover, even as the shifting tides of the global economy have rewarded the richest while squeezing the middle class, the U.S. tax system has favored the very top, as the tax returns of the Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, have illustrated. In 2011, Romney paid an effective tax rate of just 14.1 per cent, and his income of $13.7 million places him in the 0.01-per-cent group. ...

Comparing Hitler and Obama, as Cooperman did last year at the CNBC conference, is something of a meme. In 2010, the private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, compared the President’s as yet unsuccessful effort to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment his sector receives to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. ... [And] he couldn’t resist repeating the analogy when we spoke in May of this year. “You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty -seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world,” Cooperman said. “Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied. Now, Obama’s not Hitler. I don’t even mean to say anything like that. But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual.” ... Their personal enrichment came to be seen as a precondition for the enrichment of everyone else. Lower taxes for them were a social good, rather than a selfish perk. ...

[Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist, added:] “If you are a job creator, your fifteen-per-cent tax rate is righteous. . The idea that the rich deserve to be rich is a very comforting idea if you are rich.” ... The middle class anonymously and nervously pays its thirty-five per cent to the I.R.S., while the super-rich pay fourteen per cent, and are then praised for giving five or ten per cent more to pet causes, often with the perk of having their names engraved above the door. ... [In this regard, Cooperman said of Mitt Romney:] “He made a lot of money and he paid less taxes than the average person, but he did it from legal means. Does that make me think less of him? It’ll make me think more of him41.”

This means that, since the top one percent appropriated ninety-three ninety percent of the gains during the 2009-2010 recession (here euphemistically called “recovery”), a paltry seven percent of gains were sprinkled, again very unequally, among the remaining ninety nine percent of the population, whose income is taxed 2.5 times more than that of the rich, as represented by the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Even if the putative gains for the remaining 99% percent were shared equally, they would see those “gains” averaging

0.07 percent. That would correspond to just 7 cents per $1000 of income. This hypothetical “gain” would come to 2-3 dollars per year for an average American. Nevertheless, the twin parties of the establishment paint themselves as guardians of “the middle class,” whose actual state is receding like an overtaken car disappearing in a rearview mirror.

The political and social reality is rapidly installing a rising dictatorship of new power, which combines political fiat with monetary fiat — in other words, the simultaneous rises in political fiat and fiat money have been mutually supporting. While the arrival of fiat money has been commonly traced to the unilateral, kingly termination of the gold standard by Richard Nixon 1971, the idea behind money by fiat is much older, having certain very important precedents in the earliest constitutional documents of the United States.

The 1778 Articles of Confederation already singled out debts as the special commandment of the new state’s political religion, making them a matter of “the public faith” which is “hereby solemnly pledged.” In the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8), among the powers of Congress, the power to collect taxes and to pay debts is listed first. And the first function which is specifically singled out is “to borrow money on credit.” Amendment XIV of July 9, 1868, which formally extended citizenship to the former slaves, includes in Section 4 the remarkable stipulation that “the validity of the public debt of United States ... shall not be questioned” — the freedom of speech in Amendment I notwithstanding.

41 Freeland Ch. Super-Rich Irony: Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama? // The New Yorker. October 8, 2012. URL: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland?currentPage=all (Accessed October 28, 2012).

Fiat money as a new principal mechanism for managing humanity, behind the public slogans of “the free-market economy,” was born together with the modern system of banking. As Marx himself showed in one of his most revealing passages in Capital:

The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, the origins of which are to be found in Genoa and Venice as early as the Middle Ages, took possession of Europe as a whole during the period of manufacture. ... The national debt, i.e., the alienation [Verausserung] of the state—whether the state is despotic, constitutional or republican—marked the capitalist ear with its stamp. The only part of the so-called national wealth [before the rise of national defense and then eventually also of the so-called welfare state] that actually enters into collective possession of a modern nation is—the national debt. Hence, quite consistently with this, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, lack of faith in the national debt takes the place of the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness. The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of private accumulation. ... The state’s creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. ... [T]he national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies ... and to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy. At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments ... Hence the accumulation of the national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stocks of the founding of the banks, whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of England began by lending its money to the government at 8 per cent; at the same time it was empowered by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it a second time to the public in the form of bank-notes. . It was not long before this credit-money, created by the bank itself, became the coin in which the latter made its loans to the state, and paid, on behalf of the state, the interest on the public debt. It was not enough that the bank gave with one hand and took back more with the other; it remained, even while receiving money, the eternal creditor of the nation down to the last farthing advanced. . As the national debt is backed by the revenues of the state, which must cover the annual interest, payments etc., the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses without the taxpayers feeling it immediately, but they still make increased taxes necessary as a consequence. . Overtaxation is [then] not an accidental occurrence, but rather a principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first inaugurated . [it was extolled] as the best system for making the wage-laborer submissive, frugal, industrious ... and overburdened with work42.

The global security state, and the force which gives it meaning

It is already becoming evident that the arrangement of the global system reacts very positively (as much as this can be called positive) to war and the use of force and violence as

42 Marx K. Capital. Vol. 1. Ben Fowkes trans. New York, 1990. P. 920-921.

its rallying stimulus, self-administered excitement, and gratifying passion and pleasure. While many Americans have bought the notion that their social services, the taxes for which are often used elsewhere, are “entitlements,” the calls to keep spending ever more on the military is religiously hailed as what gives Americans their freedom. This, in spite of the fact that the U.S. military spends nearly half of what the rest of the whole world combined spends on war and defense, and that U.S. military spending has more than doubled since 2001. If, however, one combines the military spending of the U.S. and the rest of NATO (which is, after all, the military extension of the U.S. global security state, but still excludes other U.S. allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia, and South Korea), then the U.S. controls a military colossus, which, with 13% of the world population, commands 70% of the world’s war budget, leaving barely 30 percent for the remaining 90 percent of mankind. However, if you ask who feels most threatened in the world and who uses the word “security threat” most often, the answer is out there. It is the very one who outspends everyone else on war and weapons several times over.

The rising global state is a qualitative transformation of the national security state whose foundations were laid in the beginning of the Cold War — on July 26, 1947 when, aboard VC-54C presidential aircraft Sacred Cow, President Truman signed the National Security Act, which established the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the National Security Council. Ever since, the national security state has been decisively morphing, by now into a global security state whose politics, both “domestic” and “foreign,” is being progressively militarized. After 9/11, the buildup of this global state has been vastly intensified and expanded.

To better appreciate the phenomenon of the rising global as global, rather than simply “national,” security state, it is useful to point out that the world’s biggest employer (and America’s as well) is the U.S. government. And within the U.S. government, the largest department, the U.S. Department of Defense on its own also tops — as reported by the Economist — the list of the world’s biggest employers, with 3.2 million employees43:

43 Defending jobs // The Economist. September 12, 2011. URL:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/09/employment (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

The second largest employer in the world is the Chinese People's Army, which still trails the U.S. Departmen of Defense nearly by one million people. At the same time, China’s population is some 1,350,000 people, while the U.S. has some 315 million. If China were to adjust the size of its army in accordance with the U.S. proportion (the number in the U.S. Department of Defense relative to the U.S. population), the Chinese army would have to explode to nearly 14 million (13,714,286).

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in September of 2012, the U.S. government as by far the largest employer in the U.S. had 20.5 million people on its payroll. This number, however, includes only those officially categorized as “civilian labor force” or, more precisely, “the employed civilian non-institutional labor force.” The latter category is rather peculiar, for “institutional labor force” includes the same category those in criminal, mental or other types of facilities along with those who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. The total of “the employed civilian non-institutional labor force” is listed at 143 million. This means that nearly every other American of productive age is not employed — the 143 million employed American civilians are only 58% of the overall available “civilian labor force,” which, as of September 2012 totaled 244 million Americans. Over 100 million working age Americans (every third American, if one adds the children and the elderly) thus have no jobs. Out of these 100 million, the U.S. government considers 87.8 million working-age Americans to be “not in the labor force,” so they are not included in the unemployment rate. Thus, by

virtue of reclassification fiat, millions of workers formerly classified as “unemployed” have now been quietly moved into the “not in labor force” category. As one commentator put it, “you have to be delusional to believe that there are nearly 88 million working-age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.” Since the start of the last or current recession, about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined. The average duration of unemployment in the United States today is about three times longer than it was in 2000. In 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs; today, less than 65 percent of all American men do. And the vast majority of the jobs that are being lost are well-paying full-time jobs. 95 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were middle-class jobs. In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, that ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings. 47 million Americans now receive food-stamps (actually food-stamp debit cards now) — every fifth among all working-age Americans. A full one third of the U.S. population receives at least part of their food through this system. JP Morgan, which administers the food stamp system, charges 62 to 64 cents for each food stamp case handled monthly. As of January 2011, out of the 140-million-strong labor force, at least 27 million were officially listed as part-time — 8.9 million part-time “for economic reasons” and 18 million part-time for “non-economic reasons.” This means that some 130 million Americans are either unemployed, underemployed , or “not in the labor force,” and that only some 47% of working-age Americans have full-time jobs44.

The restructuring of both economy and society away from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time employment without benefits has been both systematic and dramatic. The real numbers, which would show the unprecedented dismantling of employment and the buying power of the less wealthy 90-99% of the population, are excluded from the usual statistics supplied by state and corporate media. Occasionally, however, some information trickles through. A recent New York Times article noted:

[Ms. Hardin] remains a part-time worker despite her desire to work full-time. In fact, all 22 employees at her store are part-time except for the five managers. ... “Over

44 The Employment Situation - September 2012 // Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. October 5, 2012. URL: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012). There Are 100 Million Working Age Americans That Do Not have Jobs // The Economic Collapse. May 3, 2012. URL: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/there-are-100-million-working-age-americans-that-do-not-have-jobs (Accessed October, 10, 2012). Only 47% of Working Age Americans Have Full Time Jobs,” Business Insider/Money Game, January 24, 2011. URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/real-employment-rate-47-percent-2011-1 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

the past two decades, many major retailers went from a quotient of 70 to 80 percent full-time to at least 70 percent part-time across the industry,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group, a retail consulting firm. ... The widening use of part-timers has been a bane to many workers, pushing many into poverty and forcing some onto food stamps and Medicaid. And with work schedules that change week to week, workers can find it hard to arrange child care, attend college or hold a second job, according to interviews with more than 40 part-time workers. ... But in two leading industries — retailing and hospitality — the number of part-timers who would prefer to work full-time has jumped to 3.1 million, or two-and-a-half times the 2006 level, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In retailing alone, nearly 30 percent of part-timers want full-time jobs, up from 10.6 percent in

2006. Retailers and restaurants use so many part-timers not only because it gives them more flexibility, but because it significantly cuts payroll costs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part-time workers in service jobs received average compensation of $10.92 an hour in June, which includes $8.90 in wages plus benefits of $2.02. Full-time workers in that sector averaged 57 percent more in total compensation — $17.18 an hour, made up of $12.25 in wages and $4.93 in benefits. Benefit costs are far lower for part-timers because, for example, just 21 percent of them are in employer-backed retirement plans, compared with 65 percent of full-timers. ... Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said companies benefited from using many part-timers. “It’s almost like sharecropping — if you have a lot of farmers with small plots of land, they work very hard to produce in that limited amount of land,” he said. “Many part-time workers feel a real competition to work hard during their limited hours because they want to impress managers to give them more hours.” Ms. Rosser, the Jamba Juice district manager, amplified on the advantages. “You don’t want to work your team members for eight-hour shifts,” she said. “By the time they get to the second half of their shift, they don’t have the same energy and enthusiasm. We like to schedule people around four- to five-hour shifts so you can get the best out of them during that time45.”

More and more Americans are thus systematically being turned into new “sharecroppers,” who are discovering that they can no longer live on their truncated wages. They are also learning that if they do not show the utmost loyalty and flexibility — a constant readiness to be immediately available for work — they face severe penalization. When they are not laid off and swiftly replaced by others, who are also desperate for jobs — for any jobs

— their already shrunken hours of work are further reduced, along with their already diminished income.

The number of Americans who are both directly and indirectly employed by the U.S. government or who depend on government contracts is, however, certainly far higher than the 20.5 million U.S. government employees, for that number covers only those who are 1) directly employed and 2) who are classified as part of “civilian non-institutional force.” The

45 Greenhouse S. A Part-Time Life, as Hours Shrink and Shift // New York Times. October 27, 2012. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/business/a-part-time-life-as-hours-shrink-and-shift-for-american-workers.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print (Accessed October 28, 2012).

whole defense industry is depends directly on the U.S. government and the vast outlays of military funding, which dwarfs anything in the world. In addition, both for ideological reasons and also to conceal the vast spread and reach of the government, the U.S. government has been intensively “outsourcing,” “contracting out,” or “[pseudo-]privatizing” many of its services, even when that usually means paying or overpaying significant premiums for such practices. As a rule, for every soldier deployed in Iraq or in Afghanistan, there was more than one civilian contractor. These contractors (if they are Westerners) are routinely paid three-to-four times more than the professional troops, or even more. Even in Iraq, after the official withdrawal in 2010, a CENTCOM report says that, in Financial Year 2012, the U.S. Government contractor population in Iraq numbers approximately 13,500 personnel46. The nature and size of this militarized regime — the global security state or Leviathan — is thus being carefully covered and disguised.

Thus, if we add the official numbers of 20.5 million civilian government employees to 3.2 million military personnel, we could see that, at least every 4th American who is not unemployed or underemployed is directly employed by the U.S. government, which, however, still leaves out all the millions who depend on government contracts and orders in one way or another. In a word, the security state and its military-industrial complex are the engine of the economy and by far the main (re)distributor of wealth.

All this means that the continuous slogans about “free-market economy” and the recently introduced myth of “small business” as the creator of jobs in the U.S. (a favorite chorus-line by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney) notwithstanding, it is the state, especially, the national/global security state, that forms the axis and core of the U.S. economy and its “capitalism.”

At the same time, if there is a party that is most unapologetically attached to the security apparatus of the rising global state, it is Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. Not to mention the fact, that the conveniently undefined “small business” sector is so flexible as to cover anything from a politician receiving $80,000 per dinner speech to a large number of corporations.

In a word, the state and government are the true center of economic life, and “free market capitalism,” with its supposedly free system of negotiations and bargaining, like its recent anachronistic corollary of “small business,” serve cognitive dissonance, denial, and self-beautification. This need for such beauty treatments, which palatably invert one’s reality,

46 Isenberg D. Contractors in War Zones: Not Exactly ‘Contracting.’ // Overseas Civilian Contractors. October 9, 2012. URL: http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/?controllerName=search&action=search&chann el=news&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22Supreme+Court%22 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

is somewhat analogous to the myth and dreamlike cult of a cowboy who lives off violence (“shoot first and ask questions later”) and who takes his own and others’ fate into his own hands by wielding a tool of death faster, better, and more decisively than the other. Such a cowboy world bifurcates into the quick and the dead, with the gunman at their epicenter.

But in the brave new ugly world in which corporations have progressively shed most post-World War II benefits, government employees still enjoy gold-plated benefits, bonuses, health care, job security, and pensions, thus effectively maintaining a two-tier citizenship system with its citizen or imperial aristocracy in the pay of the government. Not only does government persist as the chief employer, but it also is by far the greatest investor, and the greatest consumer of goods in the nation as well as globally. Yet the more this trend strengthens, the more the U.S. political establishment seeks refuge in slogans against “big government.” The specter of big government is, however, never presented as what it truly is

— a security state with global appetites. Instead, much energy and lots of PR is spent on the idea that the explosion of “big government” is due to bloated social services and “entitlements,” which are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.

The discernible objective of the PR crusade against the safety net, labor protection, “entitlements,” minimum wage, environmental protection (that is, life protection) is to secure the dictatorship of corporations (already awash in money), further “deleverage” labor’s shrinking price, and dismantle the remaining defenses of labor. To this effect, “big government” is cast as a public threat, to the public, in the form of wasteful, expensive, and undesirable social safety net programs, now labeled by both of the legacy parties as excessive “entitlements.” Being helped or helping others is portrayed as not only inefficient but also anti-American — social programs are denounced violations of the mythic “self-reliant individual” who achieves or aspires to “the American Dream” by “making it big.” In a word, the public is asked to demand its own greater social insecurity, vulnerability, and exposure to corporate power in exchange for a supposedly freer meanness and greater, fictitious selfesteem. This same anti-social program is also one of the key ideological exports of the rising global security state.

Part of the systemic strategies of concealing the nature, orientation, scope, and costs of the rising global state is, indeed, hiding its militarization behind the right-wing media’s continuous onslaught on social programs, which are already lagging severely behind the standard of other developed countries (no maternity leave, no universal child care system, the most expensive higher education system, no universal health care, etc.). The communication strategies deployed have undoubtedly been effective in inducing in many Americans an

adamant denial of reality, to an extent unprecedented elsewhere, but solidly firm among “the free and the brave.”

As Cornell University professor Suzanne Mettler discovered, at least every other American is now not only unaware of receiving or having received any government social benefits, but is also hostile to these programs in principle. Anywhere from 25% (Food Stamps) to 40+% (Social Security, G.I. Bill, Medicare) to over 60% (Home Mortgage Interest Deduction) recipients report they have never used a government social program47.

It is both interesting and telling that, due to the much higher levels of ideological indoctrination and the “spirit of the corps,” the rate of such denial, about receiving any form of assistance or being on a government payroll, is well over 80 percent among U.S. military service personnel and veterans. As one such a U.S. veteran furiously put it, disregarding the ludicrous irony of using as his “proof” the government-typed, government-issued form in his hands, while ignoring the fact that the military is a government program par excellence:

The G.I. Bill is not a goddamn government program, Its something I paid for. It says right on my contract that it is not a student loan or entitlement but a purchased program option. Don’t throw me in with the pell and map granters, I served 5 years over seas and paid $200 a month for this shit. I earned it48.

Those identifying themselves as “conservatives” are also much less likely to acknowledge using a government program. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” has become a proverbial expression of such popular reality-denial. 25% of Medicare beneficiaries in 2009 believed their benefits came from a private insurance company.

On her part, Mettler herself, however, argues that this strange and striking phenomenon is not chiefly a failure of communication, but is mainly endemic to the character of the state itself, which she calls the “submerged state.” I would argue, however, that the “submerged state” itself is a communication strategy as well as the modus operandi of the rising global state, which dislikes and repels the light of the day. The fact is, which Mettler herself duly notes, that in recent decades federal policymakers have increasingly shunned the outright disbursal of benefits to individuals and families and instead have favored less visible

47 Mettler S. The Submerged State. Chicago, 2011.

48 A reader’s comment // Sloan J. Most Beneficiaries Of Government Programs Don’t Know They Use Government Programs. The Disinformation Company. Posted on August 4, 2011. URL:

http://www.disinfo.com/2011/08/most-beneficiaries-of-government-programs-dont-know-theY-use-government-programs/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012). The Disinformation Company is a media company based in New York City that promotes important political, social or cultural issues that are ignored by the mainstream media.

and more indirect incentives and subsidies, from tax breaks to payments for services to private companies.

As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits they receive, but also, what is of even greater political significance, that the policies of the submerged state shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans, exacerbating inequality (the bulk of deductions and exclusions for employer-sponsored health insurance, home mortgage interest deduction, and charitable contributions deductions go to those in upper-income sectors). The fact — the well concealed fact, that is — is that many social programs are confusing and opaque, and shower benefits disproportionately on the well-to-do.

The submerged state thus also works as a huge, well disguised machine for transfering wealth from the poor to the wealthy. To this effect, the programs used by lower-income people are deliberately made more obvious (and even more degrading). Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937, for example, is meant to help people procure housing; however, recipients are subject to intense, invasive scrutiny to an extent that mortgage-holders are not. They are subject to regular government inspections — as often as once a month — in which the inspector will rifle through their cabinets, their drawers, everything, in a search for something that would disqualify the person from the program. Food assistance programs put limitations on what kind of food one can buy. In Minnesota, legislation was recently proposed that would forbid welfare recipients from having more than a certain amount of cash in their pockets at any time because the government can't control what people spend. Many of the programs for low-income people are thus designed to drive home the point that the poor deserve less dignity and protection, reinforcing the message that being poor is a bad thing.

This also casts light on the reason behind the stunning success of this rising global state and its corporate media’s communication strategy in keeping so many Americans in the state of such vociferous denial and blindness to reality. That reason has to do with a social lie: both government and the mainstream media are very good at painting the most visible beneficiaries of social programs (the poor and the less well-off) as parasites and losers who are merely “takers,” while the rich are the “job creators.” In other words, the strategy exploits a deeply seated need for recognition and its flip side, an anxiety at being socially ostracized and delegated to a modern analogue of the “untouchable” caste. Accordingly, nearly all Americans, regardless of their actual wealth and status, claim to be part “of the middle class,” for that is socially acceptable and also the politically right place to be. Receiving aid (or depending on aid) is presented as incompatible with the American character and American exceptionalism. A whole culture is thus constructed around the message that receiving aid

should not be seen, as it is elsewhere, as a basic human, social, or citizen’s right. No. Receiving social or government aid is branded as a shame and a certificate of one’s inferiority. Under this intense and ubiquitous psychological pressure, people become conditioned to internalize a state of very thick denial. And that deeply seated denial then also combines with the similarly strong denial of empire — the rising global security state — which together grant the rising global state its existence and its freedom to do as it pleases.

Consequently, middle- and upper-class recipients of government programs have been the least likely to recognize themselves as such. This demonstrates the keen though well-concealed class bias in these communication strategies. The policies and programs of the “submerged” though rising global state hide the degree to which the middle and upper classes use and benefit from the security state, while remaining its key beneficiaries, supporting “security,” and calling for reductions in social programs — for the others.

These submerged policies thus obscure the role of government — the reality — and exaggerate that of the mythical market. In a word, the rising global state prefers hidden policies or hidden reality to transparency and publicity. In place of the latter, the rising global place presents simplified, easily digested fictions, which receive wide publicity, while reality is eclipsed. In other words, the rising global state is something of an iceberg. Its visible top makes the headlines, and also becomes the subject of most of what passes for political science, While the submerged and much greater part is so well hidden that it sinks the awareness and understanding of the many — our new Titanic is also its own berg — to the bottom.

What has been said above also allows us to see the principal “dialectical contradiction” of the rising global state — the clash between inexorable reality and the make-believe shadows churned out by the incorporated mass communication systems for the modern-day “caves” of our minds and hearts. More simply, the central dialectical contradiction and struggle of our time is defined by the clash between the rising awareness of humanity, its possible awakening, and the imperial imperatives of the rising global state. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a chief strategist of the latter, has said very much the same — except that he sees the rising political awareness as the “historically unprecedented” and most fundamental security threat:

The basic challenge that NATO now confronts is that there are historically unprecedented risks to global security. ... The paradox of our time is that the world ... is experiencing intensifying popular unrest ... Yet there is no effective global security mechanism for coping with the growing threat of violent political chaos stemming from humanity’s recent political awakening. The three great political contests of the

twentieth century (the two world wars and the Cold War) accelerated the political awakening of mankind, which was initially unleashed in Europe by the French Revolution. Within a century of that revolution, spontaneous populist political activism had spread from Europe to East Asia. On their return home after World Wars I and II, the South Asians and the North Africans who had been conscripted by the British and French imperial armies propagated a new awareness of anti-colonial nationalist and religious political identity among hitherto passive and pliant populations. The spread of literacy during the twentieth century and the wide-ranging impact of radio, television, and the Internet accelerated and intensified this mass global political awakening. . The dispersal of global power and the expanding mass political unrest make for a combustible mixture. . There is no other way to shape effective security arrangements for a world in which politically awakened peoples — whose prevailing historical narratives associate the West less with their recent emancipation and more with their past subordination — can no longer be dominated by a single region49.

On a number of occasions in 2008 and 2009, Brzezinski further elaborated on his political diagnosis of the principal challenge faced in “global governance” and outlined its implications, as he understands them. According to Brzezinski, the unprecedented global awakening makes it increasingly difficult for the U.S. to maintain world dominance, and then he went on to say:

I once put it rather pungently, and I was flattered that the British Foreign Secretary repeated this, as follows ... namely, in earlier times, it was easier to control a million people, literally it was easier to control a million people than to physically kill a million people. Today, it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people. It is easier to kill than to control. And, of course, that bears directly on the use of force particularly by societies that are culturally alien to other societies50.

For Brzezinski, the key contradiction and challenge of our world is thus “resolved” into a neo-fascist dilemma between control and death.

How to own humanity: “Let there be debt!”

If, in 1955, the U.S. largest private employers in 1955 were GM, Chrysler, U.S. Steel Standard Oil of New Jersey, Amoco, Goodyear and Firestone, whereas now the largest labor force among U.S. private companies is no longer in the sector of production or manufacturing,

49 Brzezinski Z. An Agenda for NATO — Toward a Global Security // Foreign Affairs. September /October 2009. URL: http://www.ata-sac.org/ncbc/highlights-news/an-agenda-for-nato—toward-a-global-security-web/ New Challenges Better Capabilities (Accessed October, 10, 2012). Emphasis added. The speech originally delivered at the NATO Defence Ministers Meeting, Bratislava, Slovakia, October 17, 2009.

50 Brzezinski Zbigniew: It Is Infinitely Easier to Kill a Million People than to Control a Million People // Youtube. October 10, 2012. URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkCEOSgLRt4 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

but in retail shopping, and belongs to Walmart, Target, Sears, and Kroger51. That is the other (both more apparent and superficial) side of the rising global (security) state.

Today, manufacturing in the U.S. officially (per the U.S. Bureau of Labor) employs just under 12 million people52. In reality, the situation is worse. In her study, Michele Nash-Hoff showed that, during the last decade, U.S. manufacturing has actually declined more than it did even during the Great Depression of the 1930s — during the Great Depression, the U.S. lost 30.9% of manufacturing jobs, but in the decade of 2000-2010, it lost 33.1% of manufacturing jobs. Every third job lost in the last decade was in the manufacturing sector — in real terms, a total of 5.7 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. In addition, the authors assert that “the government's official calculation of manufacturing output growth, and by definition productivity, is significantly overstated.” Furthermore, the report of the respectable Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) made the following finding:

There are serious problems with how the U.S. government measures manufacturing output that cause it to significantly overstate output and, by extension, productivity. ... [T]here are substantial upward biases in the U.S. government’s official statistics and that real manufacturing output and productivity growth [are] significantly overstated. The most serious bias relates to the computers and electronics industry (NAICS 334) — its output is vastly overstated. Correcting for these statistical biases, we see that the base of U.S. manufacturing has eroded faster over the past decade than at any time since WWII, when the United States began compiling the statistics.

In correcting the systemic biases in the official data, the ITIF concluded that “U.S. manufacturing labor productivity growth was overstated by a remarkable 122 percent. Moreover, manufacturing output, instead of increasing at the reported 16 percent rate, in fact fell by 11 percent over the period53.”

The rising global state is also increasingly a quasi-rentier state — a state whose main products are globalized debt, the export of fiat money (and hence debt), consumption, weapons, and global military force. Thus the rising global state is a rentier state of a special

51 America's 5 Biggest Employers — Then and Now // Huffington Post Business. September 22, 2010. URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/23/americas-5-biggest-

employ_n_736215.html#s143988&title=1_General_Motors (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

52 The Employment Situation — September 2012 // Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. October 5, 2012. URL: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

53 Atkinson, R.D., Stewart L.A., Andes, S.M. Ezell, S. Worse Than the Great Depression: What the Experts Are

Missing About American Manufacturing Decline. Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. March 19, 2012. URL: http://www.itif.org/publications/worse-great-depression-what-experts-are-missing-about-american-manufacturing-decline (Accessed October, 10, 2012). Nash-Hoff M. American Manufacturing Has Declined More Than Most Experts Have Thought. // Huffington Post. March 28, 2012. URL:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-nashhoff/manufacturing-jobs_b_1382704.html?view=print&comm_ref=false (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

kind. It lives off rents by covertly taxing everyone else, or drawing products and wealth from others chiefly by exercising a near monopoly on the world currency — the printing or rather conjuring of virtual, fiat money, for which real products and wealth are then bought.

At the same time, this rentier state is both the world’s banker as well as the world’s greatest debtor. As such, it is no longer really the “bank of last resort,” but rather the debtor of first resort, for which, moreover, war too has not been a last resort option either. It is also debt and fiat money, which help conceal the true nature, size, and appetites of the rising global state.

In order to secure its fiat of globalized debt, on January 6, 2011, the Federal Reserve stealthily tucked into its weekly report on its balance a new quasi-constitutional, but nevertheless far reaching amendment (fiat), which was phrased in highly technical terms as an “accounting methodology change” and which, except for Reuters, was dutifully not reported by any of the corporate media. The new “rule,” which the Federal Reserve monarchically bestowed upon itself, says that, if the Federal Reserve or its regional reserve banks (which are private) incur losses, the Federal Reserve is now making it its sovereign right and power to reclassify these losses as “a liability [or debt] to the Treasury” — and thus to the American taxpayers. They’re all simply written down as “liabilities to the Treasury.” The Federal Reserve would simply direct future profits from Fed operations toward that liability — due to everyone else. The move was justified with a claim that this arbitrary and self-serving convenience would “enhance transparency by providing clearer, more frequent snapshots of the finances.” Thus, “technically,” the Federal Reserve can from now on never go bankrupt — its losses will be automatically someone else’s — with the compliments (and through the force) of the rising global state itself, of course. Nevertheless, Reuters itself hailed the Fed’s royally autocratic move as “prudent” and dismissed the charge of “accounting shenanigans” as “a luxury.”54 This underhand “technical trifle,” which can condemn many to misery without exit, however, also reveals what hides at the very heart of the modern system of fiat money, by means of which much of what we do is managed and controlled. The mystery of debt and money, which haunts mankind, consists of such seemingly minor, inconspicuous “accounting tricks,” which are, however, mystifying moves enforced with the whole power of the state.

54 Only 47% of Working Age Americans Have Full Time Jobs // Business Insider/Money Game. January 24,

2011. URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/real-employment-rate-47-percent-2011-1 (Accessed October, 10, 2012). Da Costa P.N. Accounting tweak could save Fed from losses. Reuters. January 21, 2011. URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/21/us-usa-fed-accounting-idUSTRE70K6OK20110121 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

Economically and financially, the U.S. as a system is, indeed, more and more defined by debt55.

US National Debt Statistics National Debt Debt Per Taxpayer

4.9.2011 $15,638,610,000,000 $137,000

2010 $13.6 Trillion $121,000

2005 $9 $78,000

2000 $5.6 $53,000

1995 $5 $48,000

1990 $3.2 $32,000

1985 $1.9 $19,000

1980 $900 Billion $9,183

1975 $600 $6,060

1970 $400 $4,123

The national debt has already surpassed $16 trillion with the fiscal year 2012 being the fourth straight year with a deficit of more than $1 trillion. As of 2009, the overall financial position of the United States included $50.7 trillion of debt owed by US households, businesses, and governments, representing more than 3.5 times the annual gross domestic product of the United States. As of March 31, 2012, total consumer indebtedness was $11.44 trillion, and outstanding educational debt (student loans) stood at $904 billion as of March 31, 2012.56 The average U.S. household liability is valued at $136,690 according to the most recent census estimates. At the end of June 2012, the level of domestic nonfinancial debt outstanding was $39.1, trillion, of which household debt was $13.0 trillion, and nonfinancial business debt was $12.0 trillion. As of the first quarter of 2010, domestic financial assets totaled $131 trillion and domestic financial liabilities $106 trillion57.

55 U.S. National Debt Statistics // Statistic Brain, October 4, 2012. URL: http://www.statisticbrain.com/us-national-debt/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012). The data comes from the U.S. Treasury.

56 Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit // Federal Reserve Bank of New York. May 2012. -URL: http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/national_economy/householdcredit/DistrictReport_Q12012.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

57 Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States: Flows and Outstandings, Second Quarter 2012 // U.S. Federal Reserve. September 20, 2012. URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/current/z1.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

Over the last several decades, and especially aggressively after the presidential inauguration of George W. Bush, the rising global state has moved towards setting up conditions for the large-scale indenturing of the population, which targets the younger and those below the richest 1-5 percent — in a word, the vulnerable, the weaker, and less powerful. With the help of its extended apparatus, which includes the IMF and other “international” organizations and a plethora of nominally “non-government organizations,” the rising global state has been busy at work exporting this neo-liberal model of neo-indenturing throughout the world. In the U.S. itself, health care, education, and insurance costs keep significantly outpacing both salaries and inflation so that an average job can no longer pay for what one needs in order to live in a modern society — except through the chronic bondage of debt.

Between 2005 and 2010, “the net worth” of Americans younger than 35 dropped by 37 percent. The real unemployment rate for Americans between 18 to 29 of age is 17 percent. Student debt has reached over $1 trillion, becoming the largest form of personal indebtedness in the U.S., thus surging past credit card debt and car loans. A decade ago, less than one-third of U.S. students borrowed to finance education. In 2008, 67% of students graduating from four-year colleges had to borrow to finance their education. According to government data, 62% of graduates from public universities had student debt that averaged $20,200; 72% of graduates from private non-profit universities borrowed an average of $27,650; and 96% of graduates from private for-profit colleges borrowed an average of $33,050. Moreover, student loans now are almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy (except for affirmed disability), thanks to President Bush’s stealthy coup in 2005 that changed the bankruptcy law, which singled out students for such unforgiving treatment, amounting to secured indenture. From

2005, all student debts are now “non-dischargeable” Half of the 2012 U.S. college graduates could not find employment, and 27 percent of them said their jobs have them working below the level of their education. The median salary for recession-era graduates in their first job is $27,000, or about $3,000 less, or more than 10 percent less than those who graduated before the recession58.

58 Carpenter Z. Election 2012 and the Missing Millennials // The Nation. October 17, 2012. URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/170641/election-2012-and-missing-millennials?rel=emailNation# (Accessed October, 10, 2012). Kristof K. Debt in America: Students Buried in Loans // CBS Money Watch. July 26, 2011. URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301 -505144_162-36944972/debt-in-america-students-buried-in-education-loans/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012). Riley Ch. Family net worth plummets nearly 40% // CNN. June 12, 2012. URL: http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/11/news/economy/fed-family-net-worth/index.htm (Accessed October, 10, 2012). Axelrod, J. Half of college grads can’t find full-time jobs // CBS Evening News, May 14, 2012. URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57434159/half-of-college-grads-cant-find-full-time-jobs/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

The percentage of Americans living in poverty is the highest in the fifty-three years, that is, since that the Census Bureau started publishing the figure. The average American family’s net worth dropped almost 40% between 2007 and 2010, according to a triennial study released by the Federal Reserve. The stunning drop in median net worth from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010 shows that the recession wiped away 18 years of savings and investment by families down to levels not seen since 1992. The loss of income and net worth also affected savings rates, as the number of Americans who said they saved in the prior year fell from 56.4% in 2007 to 52.0% in 2010 — the lowest level recorded since the early 1990s.

The costs of the recession and the debt economy continue to be placed disproportionately on the shoulders of its victims — the poor and the middle class, while the rich continue to benefit from the crisis. In these conditions, wealth and income inequalities are becoming a powerful tool in the incipient neo-feudalization of society — on the road to a new serfdom. Families in the top 10% of income actually saw their net worth increase over the period, rising from a median of $1.17 million in 2007 to $1.19 million in 2010. Middle-class families who ranked in the 40th to 60th percentile of income earners reported that their median net worth fell from $92,300 to $65,900 over the same time period. In the face of these difficult realities, the Republican Party keeps religiously adhering to its supposed panacea fundamentalism, which can be simply summarized as: “Whatever the problem, the rich must be helped first of all and before anyone else. From there it is but a matter of ‘trickling down.” The Democratic Party talks more about the middle class, but, in practice, as the good right-wing party of the security state it is, it too invariably ends up assisting chiefly the rich — the elite and the aristocracy of the incorporated Leviathan.

One of the most important statements on the emergence of the global security state was made by Gore Vidal, one of the greatest voices in contemporary American literature. In June 4, 1988, the Nation magazine published his essay, “The National Security State,” which was originally given as a speech at the National Press Club. According to Vidal, the turning point in the decisive shift to a global security state from a more traditional empire (which “started officially in 1898 with our acquisition of the Philippines”) came on March 12, 1947, when President Truman decided that the U.S. should from then on “police Russia’s every border.” The new “national security state” was a “new kind of country, unlike anything that the United States had ever known before.” The program for this historically unprecedented power on earth was enshrined in the so-called NSC-68 adopted in January 1950, but declassified only in 1975. Its key principles are:

1) Never negotiate with Russia in good faith.

2) Without an enemy, the national security state cannot exist.

3) Militarize.

4) Socialize the costs of the national security state through taxes and debt.

5) Mobilize the whole society against the enemy’s specter.

6) Extend the national security state into a global force through NATO and other security arrangements.

To the above declared items, the maintenance of a climate of fear can be added as a further imperative.

In practice (as opposed to pious theories and talking points), the program meant a “strict governmental control of our economy.” In terms of strategic communication, this discordant practice required that “the press and the politicians constantly falsify the revenues and disbursements of the federal government ... by wrongly counting Social Security contributions and expenditures as a part of the federal budget [or revenues] ... because neither the press nor the politicians want the public to know how much of its tax money goes for war ...” Social Security was, however, to operate as “an independent and income-transferring trust fund.” In this connection, Vidal observed:

In actual fact, close to 90 percent of the disbursement of the federal government go for what is laughingly known as “defense.” This is how: In 1986, the gross revenue of the government was $794 billion. Of that amount, $294 billion were Social Security contributions, which should be subtracted from the money available to the national security state. That leaves $500 billion. Subsequent budgets show different figures but similar proportions. Of the $500 billion, $286 billion went to defense; $12 billion for foreign arms to our client states; $8 billion to $9 billion to energy, which means, largely, nuclear weapons; $27 billion for veterans’ benefits ... and finally$142 billion for interest on loans that were spent, over the past forty years, to keep the national security state at war, hot or cold. So, of 1986’s $500 billion in revenue, $475 billion was spent on National Security business. ... [O]nly $358 billion was collected in taxes ... but it is hard to reduce a budget the people are never told about59.

As shown earlier, concerns of a typical American are heavily inward oriented and determined by his or her immediate circumstances, in which the issue of jobs and money dominate the rest, while foreign policy questions are, as a rule, at the very bottom. The priorities of the rising global state are quite different. This was very poignantly revealed at the very end of an October 18, 2012 interview of President Obama with Jon Stewart when President Obama, already rushing out of the door so to speak, went on to recite robotically the

59 Vidal G. The National Security State, in Vidal G. The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Monroe, ME, 2000. P. 26-33.

mission of the rising security state and hence also his job description, as he understands it. Here the beginning of President Obama’s list was given in the proper order from the reigning perspective — of the rising global state:

Whatever else I have done throughout the course of my presidency, one thing that I have been absolutely sure of is that American security comes first and the American people need to know exactly how I make decisions concerning war, peace, national security and protecting Americans and they will get that for the rest of my presidency. ... [T]he stakes on this cannot be bigger—war, peace, Supreme Court, women’s right to choose, whether we create jobs in this country or whether they are getting shipped overseas, whether our kids receive the best education they can, all this stuff is at stake .60

The Rising Global State and Strategic Communication

The time has come to draw together our last two main terms — the rising global state

and strategic communication. What distinguishes the latter from all other kinds of communication, public relations, propaganda, psychological operations, or information warfare, is the addition of the term “strategic,” which is not merely an addition, but a designation that provides a clue to the special, indeed commanding quality of strategic communication. Conversely put, the word “strategic” denotes the term — the implied presence of the terminus, the decisive telos or sovereign purpose, the ultimate end to which other forms of communications and discourse, as well as other political and not-so political actions are to be subordinated. All relations involve some sort of communication, and in all these relations and communications strategic communication, if it is indeed truly strategic, must hold the commanding position. Without the strategic objective (term/terminus/end), strategic communication would devolve into tactics, into mere instrumentality and narrow cleverness, thereby ignoring or forgetting the final reason and objective. Thus what arguably makes communication strategic is not so much communication as such, but its subordination to a strategy systematically deduced from the supreme strategic goal. This defining element (hegemonikon) of strategic thought in strategic communication then places — by definition

— strategic communication at the center of politics or, what some people even call, “political warfare” — as it is most broadly understood. As a Congressional committee has put it, the indispensible imperative is the “strategic focus61.”

60 Exclusive — Barack Obama Extended Interview, Part 2 // The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. October 18,

2012. URL: http://www.thedailyshow.eom/#tool_tip_2 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

61 Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Arab & Muslim World. Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World chaired by Edward D. Djerejian. U.S. House of Representatives. October 1, 2003. P. 52-53, 57. URL: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/24882.pdf (Accessed October 28, 2012). The document effectively

In relation to such strategic communication, communication management is “process creation,” which ultimately “creates” or institutes the strategic end itself. The objectives of communication management are, therefore, subordinated to the ruling strategy, which is the property of strategic communication. Accordingly, the function of communication management as a process/production of the end is to present the audience with something rather than nothing, a something with built-in agenda and aim. This means injecting into the psyche of the audience a continuous series of media (new elements) and their messages, signs, images, and clues, thereby priming the minds for the arrival and realization of the strategic objective at the very end. If strategic communication defines and controls the game, communication management carries it out.

Merely pointing to some strategic purpose in general or in the abstract, however, as standard definitions of strategic communication do, is not enough. There are no abstract strategies, and abstract goals are not true goals. So when it comes to the rising global state or U.S. strategic communication, much depends on whether the strategic terminus can be identified. Certain U.S. definitions, though conveniently or safely abstract, provide further clues about this matter. Thus, in the public parlance of the White House, strategic communication is defined as “focused United States Government efforts ... for the advancement of United States Government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, plans, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power” (my emphases)62. Obviously, this definition is almost entirely self-referential — strategic communication denotes fully focused and integrated efforts of the U.S. government to advance its interests and all its power. Here, as I tried to argue throughout the whole paper, everything depends on how deeply and how adequately we are able to grasp the character of the central subject — the state or, in this concrete case, the rising global security state itself.

The declaration of the Global War on Terror ushered in a qualitatively new phase in the rise of the global state. In fact, the Global War on Terror amounts to the rise of the rising global state’s global war, supposedly defined as war on a cipher or a contingent place-holder

— “terror” aimed officially, so far, against the global specter of Al Qaeda, whose membership the Pentagon estimates at only 100-200 persons63. In the situation of this otherwise

recommends bringing public diplomacy and public relations, including international broadcasting, under the new “architecture” or command of strategic communication.

62 Joint Publication 1-02: Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Washington, D.C., April 12, 2001 (as amended through 17 March 2009).

63 Silverstein K. The Al Qaeda Clubhouse: Members lacking // Harper’s Magazine, July 5, 2006. URL: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/07/sb-al-qaeda-new-members-badly-needed-1151963690 (Accessed June

ambiguously defined “global war” and the rising global state’s greatly intensified mobilization for it, the U.S. military has assumed a leadership role in U.S. strategic communication. As problems get increasingly militarized, by rising global states, so too are their “solutions.” Simultaneously, information is also weaponized, and the distinction between information and virus has been progressively erased. Telling one from other has already left so-called common sense behind.

For public purposes though, the U.S. Department of Defense is presenting strategic communication as its version of “public diplomacy” while still otherwise following the standard U.S. government definition.64 In practice, however, the bureaucratically sterilized wording of strategic communication is reduced to a no-nonsense bottom-line: “The job is to play with people’s heads65.” Thus, Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine wrote accordingly,

On June 15th, the entire Afghan training mission received a surprising memo from Col. Buche, Caldwell’s chief of staff [Lt. Gen. William Caldwell is a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops — the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war]. “Effective immediately,” the memo read, “the engagement in information operations by personnel assigned to the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan and Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan is strictly prohibited.” From now on, the memo added, the “information operation cell” would be referred to as the “Information Engagement cell.” The IE’s mission? “This cell will engage in activities for the sole purpose of informing and educating U.S., Afghan and international audiences..” The memo declared, in short, that those who had trained in psy-ops and other forms of propaganda would now officially be working as public relations experts

— targeting a worldwide audience. ... In recent months, the Pentagon has [also] quietly dropped the nefarious-sounding moniker “psy-ops” in favor of the more neutral “MISO” — short for Military Information Support Operations66.

And so by virtue of changing the label from “operation” to “engagement,” which sounds more positive and less military, operations are being both strategically and tactically

10, 2012). Winning or losing? // The Economist. July 18, 2008, Vol. 388, special section. P. 5. Esposito, R., Cole, M., Ross, B. President Obama’s Secret: Only 100 al Qaeda Now in Afghanistan // ABC News. December 2, 2009. -URL:http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/president-obamas-secret-100-al-qaeda-now-

afghanistan/story?id=9227861&page=2 (Accessed June 10, 2012). Ditz, J. Officials Defend Afghan Escalation, Citing Dubious al-Qaeda Ties with Taliban. // Antiwar.com. December 2, 2009. URL:

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/02/officials-defend-afghan-escalation-citing-dubious-al-qaeda-ties-with-taliban/ (Accessed June 10, 2012).

64 Nakamura K..H., Weed H., M. C. U.S. Public Diplomacy: Background and Current Issues. Congressional Research Service. December 18, 2009. URL: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40989.pdf (Accessed June 10, 2012).

65 A U.S. Psy-Ops Officer quoted in Hastings M. Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators. Rolling Stone. February 23, 2011. URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/another-runaway-general-army-deploys-psy-ops-on-u-s-senators-20110223 (Accessed October 28, 2012). In this regard, in contrast with strategic communication, the U.S. Department of Defense defines psychological operations explicitly as tactics. Ibid.

66 Ibid.

expanded — globally. At the same time, a transparent effort is being made to place psy-ops under the generic label of “public relations.”

The remarkable fact is that the creation of strategic communication coincided with two intertwined cardinal developments: 1) the rising global (“national”) security state and its indefinite global war without borders, so unapologetically and aggressively pursued by the Bush administration, and 2) the immediate global backlash against the rising global state’s neo-imperialistic policies and actions. The Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication therefore has played a critical role in the birth of strategic communication and its immediate elevation to royal status in maintaining and expanding the rising global state and reordering the world.

The 2004 Report of the aforementioned Task Force proclaimed the arrival of strategic communication and recommended a corresponding fundamental restructuring of the security state. Strategic communication was dubbed the “new vision.” Strategic communication is “central” to this rising global state and its new global war as was wining the ideological battle during the Cold War: Or, as the Report also put it: “Strategic communication must be at the center of America’s overall grand strategy ...” Tactical issues are now described as being of “second-tier” importance. They cannot drive the strategy. The strategy must be in the driving seat.

According to the Task Force on Strategic Communication, the need for strategic communication has been called by the ongoing erosion of the hitherto solid and unchallenged U.S. and Western dominance over information, knowledge, media, news, pictures, and entertainment:

In past decades, business and governmental incumbents — for example, a superpower or a leading global brand — had dominant control of the global dialogue as a result of superior resources and access to communications channels. Through the peak of mass marketing in the latter part of the 20th century, this domination of private sector mass communications resources literally developed the power of Western popular culture and the growth of global brands. But the same factors that added to the power of the incumbent leaders and brands also provided opportunity for insurgent movements and insurgent companies — for fresh, cutting-edge and sharply differentiated competitors. Today, as a result of the global Information Revolution, private sector mass marketing is losing its relative power. And the incumbent advantage for political and business leaders is being lost with it. Interestingly, in the private sector, it is not simply that incumbents have lost effectiveness in communicating. Insurgents have gained advantage at the same time — and have developed a new set of communications rules to help push that advantage. That’s why, in the private and campaign management sectors, insurgent political movements and insurgent brands are creating most of the

energy and innovation in all parts of the world today. ... Moreover, the same is true in global politics and U.S. foreign policy67.

Carefully, nevertheless quite audibly and hence daringly, the Report placed the principal blame for the eroded respectability and credibility on the U.S. before President George W. Bush and the policies of his administration. President Bush is, in fact, mentioned first among the “strategic limitations,” as identified by the Task Force. The Report also criticizes the framing of the global war as a war on the terrorist tactic.

The new paradigm of strategic communication is defined as the next new phase in the development of the national security “on a scale not seen since the 1940s” and one, which should enable “new approaches to intelligence, military force structures, nation-building, and homeland security.” To this effect, the Report emphasizes the following:

Worldwide anger and discontent are directed at America’s tarnished credibility and ways the U.S. pursues its goals. There is consensus that America’s power to persuade is in a state of crisis. Global transparency, driven by new media and low cost technologies, shape the strategic landscape. .The war has increased mistrust of America in Europe, weakened support for the war on terrorism, and undermined U.S. credibility worldwide. Media commentary is consistent with polling data. In a State Department (INR) survey of editorials and op-eds in 72 countries, 82.5 % of commentaries were negative, 17.5% positive. ...

Strategic Limitations: United States strategic communication lacks sustained Presidential direction, effective interagency coordination, optimal private sector partnerships, and adequate resources. Tactical message coordination does not equate with strategic planning and evaluation. Personal commitment by top leaders has not been matched by needed changes in the organizations they lead or in a dysfunctional interagency process. In 2002, the President’s National Security Strategy (NSS) urged fundamental change in the major instruments of statecraft designed to meet different requirements in a different era — including “a different and more comprehensive approach to public information efforts that can help people around the world learn about and understand America.” Two years later, the U.S. has made little progress in building and transforming its strategic communication assets. Strategic direction: There has been no Presidential directive on strategic communication since the Presidential Decision Directive on International Public Information (PDD 68) issued April 30, 1999. ...

Policies and strategic communication cannot be separated. Swift and sustained Presidential direction is also required to connect strategy to structure. ...

Strategic communication and other 21st century instruments of statecraft require changes different in kind but similar in scale to the National Security Act of 1947 and the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. ...

67 Ibid.

This Task Force concludes that U.S. strategic communication must be transformed.

America’s negative image in world opinion and diminished ability to persuade are consequences of factors other than failure to implement communications strategies.

Interests collide. Leadership counts. Policies matter. Mistakes dismay our friends and provide enemies with unintentional assistance. Strategic communication is not the problem, but it is a problem. ... Strategic communication is a vital component of U.S. national security. It is in crisis, and it must be transformed with a strength of purpose ... Presidential leadership and the bipartisan political will of Congress are essential. ... To succeed, we must understand the United States is engaged in a generational and global struggle about ideas, not a war between the West and Islam. It is more than a war against the tactic of terrorism68.

The Report also offers a rather candid diagnosis of the rising global state itself. At the same time, it also describes the Global War on Terror as an effective continuation of the Cold War model:

The Cold War transformed the entire U.S. national security structure, and created what has been called the “national security state.” The National Security Act of 1947, the web of military departments and intelligence agencies that it created, and the overriding doctrines of deterrence and containment, were integral to the Cold War. But above all the Cold War represented a conservative strategy that nurtured a conservative mindset ... Despite seemingly black-and-white differences in governments and policies,_over time we came to resemble our adversary, as our adversary came to resemble us. ... [T]he Cold War’s end and outcome ... reduced [ Russia in the 1990s] almost to a client state of the U.S. ... after all, the outcome was a total victory. So the Cold War template was almost mythically anointed in the decade before 9/11. Thus ... the U.S. Government reflexively inclined toward Cold War-style responses to the new threat, without a thought or a care as to whether these were the best responses to a very different strategic situation. ... [this is because] deeper expectations within the Washington policy and defense cultures still seek out Cold War models69. (My emphases. — V.S.).

It is worth noting that, in between the lines, the Report also astutely diagnoses the real political threat faced by the rising global state in the Muslim world. The principal threat, as it comes out, is not coming from small fringe terrorist groups (the power of which is constantly exaggerated for the sake of public consumption), but from the precarious nature and political weakness of the rising global state’s right-wing dictatorships and allied fundamentalist regimes, which can survive only with U.S. support:

68 Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense For Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. September

2004. URL: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/commun.pdf (Accessed October 28, 2012). The Report was part of the 2004 Defense Science Board Study on Transition to [!] and from Hostilities.

69 Ibid.

If there is one overarching goal [of the mounting resentment] ... it is the overthrow of what Islamists call the “apostate” regimes: the tyrannies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan, and the Gulf states. They are the main target of the broader Islamist movement, as well as the actual fighter groups. The United States finds itself in the strategically awkward — and potentially dangerous — situation of being the longstanding prop and alliance partner of these authoritarian regimes. Without the U.S. these regimes could not survive. Thus the U.S. has strongly taken sides in a desperate struggle that is both broadly cast for all Muslims and country-specific. This is the larger strategic context, and it is acutely uncomfortable: U.S. policies and actions are increasingly seen by the overwhelming majority of Muslims as a threat to the survival of Islam itself. ... Americans have inserted themselves into this intra-Islamic struggle in ways that have made us an enemy to most Muslims. ... Today we reflexively compare Muslim “masses” to those oppressed under Soviet rule. This is a strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies — except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends. ... Today, however, the perception of intimate U.S. support of tyrannies in the Muslim World is perhaps the critical vulnerability in American strategy. It strongly undercuts our message, while strongly promoting that of the enemy70.

With reference to the gross abuse of the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the Report noted that “[t]actical events can instantly become strategic problems (digital cameras in

Abu Ghraib). Knowledge instead of ignorance and sudden, unexpected transparency would evidently allow people to gauge more correctly the real significance of the threats posed by the rising global state—the sporty gloss over prisoners’ torture as “tactical events” notwithstanding.

A qualitatively new situation presents itself to us. It is characterized both by a synergy and a conflict between the rising global state, the initiated mobilization for a global war, and the information age. Here, the Report offers an appraisal, which is both pithy and analytically insightful:

Information saturation means attention, not information, becomes a scarce resource. Power flows to credible messengers. Asymmetrical credibility matters. What’s around information is critical. Reputations count. Brands are important. Editors, filters, and cue givers are influential. Fifty years ago political struggles were about the ability to control and transmit scarce information. Today, political struggles are about the creation and destruction of credibility71.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

To secure the expanding and rising global state, the Department of Defense Task Force on Strategic Communication recommended the establishment of a permanent strategic communication structure within the National Security Council (NSC), i.e., a Strategic Communication Committee within the NSC, a post of Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, and an “independent, non-profit, non-partisan” Center for Strategic Communication together with appropriately generous funding and support. The new “strategic communication structure” ought to be permanent.

Policy agendas are no longer to be left to “improvisation or the media.” The new vision of more fully integrated and thoroughly pervasive strategic communication is to allow for better and stronger shaping of people’s beliefs, perceptions, and understanding. The outreach of the new integrated strategy is supposed to be truly global.

In its inspiration and aspiration, such strategic communication is in its essence recognizably Aristotelian. For it was Aristotle, who identified the supreme goal of human existence with the state as the end, which ought to subsume any other human ends:

[T]hat association which is the most sovereign among them all and embraces all others will aim highest, i.e. at the most sovereign of all goods. This is the association which we call the state ... [The state] is the end of those others, and nature is itself an end; for whatever is the end-product of the coming into existence of any object, that is what we call its nature ... If then nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made ... even the art of war ... a way of acquiring property ... for that is the kind of warfare which is by nature just. (Politics 1252al;125b20;1252b27)

In a word, the strategic terminus of such strategic communication, the end of all ends, is the rising global state itself. Everything else derives from and is meant to serve this one supreme, exclusively sovereign end.

Conclusion

Constitutionally and politically, the global state instituted a radical regime change. As such, it is a coup d’état — in fact, a special coup d’état, and for several reasons. First, it is unlike any traditional regime change carried out from the top or by a part of the establishment. Second, the objectives of this coup d’état go by far beyond what local, traditional coups d’état usually hope to accomplish. The goal of the rising global state is planetary rule by Orwellian doublespeak, in which war is peace, slavery (or newly indentured labor) is freedom, ignorance is bliss and safety, and the truth is a big lie. Third, this coup d’état has been spread over many years and carried out by thousands of often carefully obscured and concealed acts, many of which are deceptively small, merely technical and ostensibly insignificant. The fact is that no

sane and sufficiently self-regarding population would ever support it if there were a choice and if that choice were to be consciously made.

The global state has created vast networks of dependents and hence constituencies with vested interests in the expansion and perpetuation of the global state, even if it means war and a global systemic crisis. To be part of its apparatus comes together with a higher citizenship status, which means more power, more money, and better protection and services. The others are treated as fair game. At the same time and to a remarkable decree, the global state also serves its clientele and beneficiaries, along with the rest, a multi-varied diet of anesthetics or mortifications of political awareness, in the form of news, pep talks, perks, benefits, entertainment, dumbed-down education, mythologies, distractions, containments, and equally remarkable servings of cognitive dissonance, compartmentalization, and denial.

On top, the global state requires single-mindedly obsessive personalities — preoccupied with amassing power, control, wealth, status, and prestige. Below this top tier, the global state requires a population too afraid to think and to face reality, with an internalized tendency to regard as offensive any attempt to enable them to think for themselves, and subversive of the security of their cage.

The global security state is a vast military machine which so far delivered war to the yards and homes of other peoples, even though its avowed mission, as affirmed in the oaths of its servicemen, is to fight both external and internal enemies of the state. It has also created historically by far the greatest number of people who make their living (and identities) by serving this enormous Leviathan that feeds off the whole earth. Therefore, to change and reform this state would require fundamental transformations of the whole construction — from the monetary system to the system of education — as well as, and perhaps first of all, the revival of the human spirit itself.

The rising global state (or more technically speaking, “the national security state”) is one of the most critical and most decisive political factors of our time. This new expansive power structure looms behind the notions of the “sole superpower,” “hegemony,” “leadership,” “benign empire,” “unilateralism,” “new world order,” or “globalization.” None of these terms are, however, adequate for capturing and understanding the nature of the rising global state and its political and economic dialectic. In foreign policy, the rising global state means regime change. Regime change is its main strategic program — for the world is to be remodeled in the image and likeness of the rising global state and its imperatives. Moreover, the rising global state itself means a fundamental change of the regime. It is a change in which the previous constitutional order is replaced with a Schmittian post-constitutional “state of

exception.” In a word, one regime is being replaced with another, and this is happing right in front of our eyes. On the way to such a qualitatively new empire, political fiat and monetary fiat meet in a synergy, which tries to free itself from the previous checks, balances, and constraints. While the rising global state is putting a premium on the use of force around the global and irrespective of existing sovereignties and borders, the rising global state’s existence as well as its fate is ultimately underwritten by the effectiveness of its strategic communication. The rise of the global state and the rise of strategic communication as the new form of governing humanity are thus intertwined or, conversely put, without the latter, the former would not be possible.

The rising global state is upon us, and, in fact, has already been upon us for quite some time. Man is a creature of habits, and it is not easy to realize what is new, especially if its recognition would require a major change in one’s views and beliefs and if many might try to close their eyes to it. Either because they are told so or because they assume that doing so would be safer. By virtue of its very existence and actions, the rising global state is, nevertheless, increasingly coming into our view. For the time being, its key strategy has, however, been to obfuscate its very presence as well as its character and thus to prevent greater political awareness from rising, in turn. Yet a new power structure is here upon us.

For the first time since the Great Depression, the middle class, the hitherto ostensibly progressive, but really conservative backbone of capitalist society, is under severe economic onslaught. But, even more so than in the 1930s, this erosion of the supportive middle is happening in the condition of the systematically vanquished, dispersed and disorganized left alternative. This, together with concentrated supports of the state and corporate wealth, is opening a way to the new rise of an extreme right, which, once again, is looking at the increasingly angry, desperate, and radicalized uprooted masses as suitable pools for new or born-again converts to faith in simple solutions and recruits for manning its shock troops. In all this, the key systematic imperative, which remains in force, is to administer and harden cognitive dissonance fitted for the denizens of the Cave described by Plato in Book VII of The Republic, but upgraded and perfected to a state of art. In a word, the strategic terminus (the very meaning) of strategic communication as the new way of governing mankind is to be withheld to the very last.

Like its debt, its economy, and its war mobilization, the rising global state is now racing against time and greater political awakening. For this Leviathan is also running a race against reality, justice, and the limits of its own power. And out of this very collision, out of the clash with stubborn reality and the tenacious human mind, strategic communication was

born — as the rising global state’s presumed child, its would-be savior and the world’s new king.

As Leo Strauss, a late prophet of the rising global, “post-constitutional” state and its tyranny, has argued, such a state is “essentially related to a corrupt people, to a low level of political life ... [which] presupposes the decline, if not the extinction, of civic virtue or of public spirit, and it necessarily perpetuates that condition. ... [And this] means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good [in speech] requires the establishment of their absolute rule [in fact; my emphases]72.” This fatal presupposition points us back to the first, truly comprehensive critique of such a dystopian regime — in Plato’s Republic (or On the Constitution) where, at the very beginning of the long discourse on such an unprecedented tyranny, Socrates diagnoses the combined desires for unlimited power and wealth, with the accompanying need for war, as a morbid inflammation of the spirit that “feeds the beasts” in the human soul (372c-374e).

Bibliography:

1. 1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance // Right Web. March 12, 2008. URL: http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1992_Draft_Defense_Planning_Guidance (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

2. Agamben G. State of Exception Kevin Attell trans. Chicago and London, 2005.

3. America's 5 Biggest Employers — Then and Now. // Huffington Post Business. September 22, 2010. -URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/23/americas-5-biggest-employ_n_736215.html#s143988&title=1_General_Motors (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

4. Atkinson R.D., Stewart L.A., Andes S.M., Ezell S. Worse Than the Great Depression: What the Experts Are Missing About American Manufacturing Decline. Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. March 19, 2012. URL: http://www.itif.org/publications/worse-great-depression-what-experts-are-missing-about-american-manufacturing-decline (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

5. Axelrod J. Half of college grads can’t find full-time jobs // CBS Evening News, May 14, 2012. URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57434159/half-of-college-grads-cant-find-full-time-jobs/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

6. Blin A., Marin G. Rethinking Global Governance // Forum for a New World Governance. 2007. URL: http://www.world-governance.org/spip.php7article132.

72 Strauss L. Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero. Op. cit. Pp. 51-52.

7. Bremmer I., Roubini N. A G-Zero World: The New Economic Club Will Produce Conflict, Not Cooperation // Foreign Affairs. March/April 2011. Pp. 2-7.

8. Brzezinski Z. An Agenda for NATO — Toward a Global Security // Foreign Affairs. September /October 2009. URL: http://www.ata-sac.org/ncbc/highlights-news/an-agenda-for-nato—toward-a-global-security-web/ New Challenges Better Capabilities (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

9. Brzezinski Z. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York, 1997.

10. Carpenter Z. Election 2012 and the Missing Millennials // The Nation. October 17, 2012.

URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/170641/election-2012-and-missing-

millennials?rel=emailNation# (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

11. Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Arab & Muslim World. Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World chaired by Edward D. Djerejian. U.S. House of Representatives. October 1, 2003. Pp. 52-53, 57. URL: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/24882.pdf (Accessed October

28, 2012).

12. Da Costa P.N. Accounting tweak could save Fed from losses. Reuters. January 21, 2011. URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/21/us-usa-fed-accounting-idUSTRE70K6OK20110121 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

13. Daalder I.H., Stavridis J.G. NATO’s Victory in Libya // Foreign Affairs. March/April 2012. Pp. 2-7.

14. Defending jobs // The Economist. September 12. 2011. URL:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/09/employment (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

15. DiehlP.F., FrederkingB. The Politics of Global Governance: International Organizations in an Interdependent World. Boulder, CO, 2010.

16. Ditz J. Officials Defend Afghan Escalation, Citing Dubious al-Qaeda Ties with Taliban // Antiwar.com. December 2, 2009. URL: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/02/officials-defend-afghan-escalation-citing-dubious-al-qaeda-ties-with-taliban/ (Accessed June 10, 2012).

17. Dreyer J.T. The Chinese Foreign Policy // Watchman Center. Vol. 12, No. 5. February

2007, Foreign Policy Research Institute. URL:

http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/125.200702.dreyer.chineseforeignpolicy.html (Accessed

October, 10, 2012).

18. Dukes P. The Superpowers: A Short History. New York, 2001.

19. Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival // New York Times. March 8, 1992. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-pentagon-s-plan-prevent-the-re-emergence-of-a-new-rival.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

20. Esposito R., Cole M., Ross B. President Obama’s Secret: Only 100 al Qaeda Now in Afghanistan // ABC News. December 2, 2009. URL:http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/president-obamas-secret-100-al-qaeda-now-afghanistan/story?id=9227861&page=2 (Accessed June 10, 2012).

21. Exclusive — Barack Obama Extended Interview, Part 2 // The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. October 18, 2012. URL: http://www.thedailyshow.com/#tool_tip_2 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

22. Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964 / Eds. P. Emberley, B. Cooper. Columbia-London, 2004.

23. Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States: Flows and Outstandings, Second Quarter

2012 // U.S. Federal Reserve. September 20, 2012. URL:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/current/z1.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

24. Fournier R. Bush Asks U.N. for Help // The Battalion. February 14. URL: 2003http://www.thebatt.com/2.8500/bush-asks-u-n-for-help-1.1210984#.UHxOk8XA_g0 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

25. Freeland Ch. Super-Rich Irony: Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama? // The

New Yorker. October 8, 2012. URL:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland?currentPage=all (Accessed October 28, 2012).

26. Fukuyama F. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Ithaca. NY, 2004.

27. Gore A. Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York, 2006.

28. Governing Globalization: Power, Authority and Global Governance / Eds. A. McGrew, D. Held. Cambridge, 2002.

29. Greenhouse S. A Part-Time Life, as Hours Shrink and Shift // New York Times. October

27, 2012. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/business/a-part-time-life-as-hours-

shrink-and-shift-for-american-workers.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print (Accessed October

28, 2012).

30. Hastings M. Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators. Rolling Stone. Febaruary 23, 2011. URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/another-runaway-general-army-deploys-psy-ops-on-u-s-senators-20110223 (Accessed October 28, 2012).

31. Horrock N.M. Bush: U.N. Could Become Irrelevant // UPI. February 18, 2003. URL: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2003/02/18/Bush-UN-could-become-irrelevant/UPI-40421045603145/#ixzz29OJhxgN0 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

32. Huntington S. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, 1996.

33. Huntington S. The Lonely Superpower // Foreign Affairs., March/April 1999. URL: http://users.dickinson.edu/~mitchelk/huntington.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

34. Isenberg D. Contractors in War Zones: Not Exactly ‘Contracting.’ // Overseas Civilian

Contractors. October 9, 2012. -URL:

http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=n ews&search= 1 &inlineLink= 1&query=%22Supreme+Court%22 (Accessed October,

10, 2012).

35. Joint Publication 1-02: Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Washington, D.C. April 12, 2001 (as amended through 17 March 2009).

36. Karns M.P., Mingst K.A. International Organizations: The Politics and Processes of Global Governance. Boulder, CO, 2009

37. Klare M.T. Containing China: The US’s Real Objective. Asia Times. April 20, 2006. URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HD20Ad01.html (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

38. Kristof K. Debt in America: Students Buried in Loans // CBS Money Watch. July 26, 2011. URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505144_162-36944972/debt-in-america-students-buried-in-education-loans/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

39. MarxK. Capital. Vol. 1. Ben Fowkes trans. New York, 1990.

40. Mettler S. The Submerged State. Chicago, 2011.

41. Miller L. China an Emerging Superpower? // Stanford Journal of International Relations. Vol. 6, Issue 1. Winter 2005. URL: http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjir/6.1.03_miller.html (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

42. Nakamura K..H., Weed H., M.C. U.S. Public Diplomacy: Background and Current Issues.

Congressional Research Service. December 18, 2009. URL:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40989.pdf (Accessed June 10, 2012).

43. Nash-Hoff M. American Manufacturing Has Declined More Than Most Experts Have Thought // Huffington Post. March 28, 2012. URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-nashhoff/manufacturing-jobs_b_1382704.html?view=print&comm_ref=false (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

44. Only 47% of Working Age Americans Have Full Time Jobs,” Business Insider/Money Game, January 24, 2011. URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/real-employment-rate-47-percent-2011-1 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

45. Princeton Readings in Political Thought / Eds. M. Cohen, N. Fermon. Princeton, 1996.

46. Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit // Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

May 2012. URL:

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/national_economy/householdcredit/DistrictReport_Q12

012.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

47. Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense For Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. September 2004. URL: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/commun.pdf (Accessed October 28, 2012).

48. Riley Ch. Family net worth plummets nearly 40% // CNN. June 12, 2012. URL: http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/11/news/economy/fed-family-net-worth/index.htm (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

49. Rosenau J.N. Toward an Ontology for Global Governance, in Approaches to Global Governance Theory / Eds. M. Hewson, T. Sinclair. Albany, 1999.

50. Rothschild M. Bush Trashes the United Nations // The Progressive. URL: http://www.progressive.org/mag_rothschild0303 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

51. Rowling J.K. Global Governance, Hamburg, 2002.

52. Rubin A.J. Retiring Envoy to Afghanistan Exhorts U.S to Heed Its Past // New York Times. July 28, 2012. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/world/asia/ambassador-crocker-sees-fraught-foreign-landscape-ahead.html?pagewanted=all (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

53. Schmitt C. Constitutional Theory. Durham-London, 2008.

54. Silverstein K. The Al Qaeda Clubhouse: Members lacking // Harper’s Magazine, July 5,

2006. URL: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/07/sb-al-qaeda-new-members-badly-

needed-1151963690 (Accessed June 10, 2012).

55. Sloan J. Most Beneficiaries Of Government Programs Don’t Know They Use Government Programs. The Disinformation Company. Posted on August 4, 2011. URL:

http://www.disinfo.com/2011/08/most-beneficiaries-of-government-programs-dont-know-they-use-government-programs/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

56. The Employment Situation — September 2012 // Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. October 5, 2012. URL: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

57. The Global Governance Reader / Ed. R. Wilkinson. New York, 2005.

58. There Are 100 Million Working Age Americans That Do Not have Jobs // The Economic Collapse. May 3, 2012. URL: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/there-are-100-million-working-age-americans-that-do-not-have-jobs (Accessed October, 10, 2012).

59. U.S. National Debt Statistics // Statistic Brain, October 4, 2012. URL:

http://www.statisticbrain.com/us-national-debt/ (Accessed October, 10, 2012). The data comes from the U.S. Treasury.

60. Vidal G. The National Security State // Vidal G. The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Monroe, ME, 2000. Pp. 26-33.

61. Weiss T.G,. Thakur R. Global Governance and the UN. Bloomington, IN, 2010.

62. Weiss T.G. Military-civilian interactions: humanitarian crises and the responsibility to protect. Lanham, MD, 2005.

63. Weiss Thakur, T.G. Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey. Bloomington, IN, 2010.

64. Winning or losing? // The Economist. July 18, 2008, Vol. 388, special section. P. 5.

65. Zbigniew Brzezinski: It Is Infinitely Easier to Kill a Million People than to Control a

Million People // Youtube. October 10, 2012. URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkCEOSgLRt4 (Accessed October, 10, 2012).