•The people must protect democracy for democracy to protect the people.
This piece returns to the American scene because it is important for Africa to understand the dynamics of America’s political economy. It is insufficient to imbibe the myths hoisted on you. If you accept them, you would believe America invented the words “democracy, justice and right.” Further, you would believe America’s actions are always and everywhere defined by these notions. To accept this perspective is to align on the wrong side of a grave deception. America occupies the pinnacle of military and economic power; possession of such might gives the nation an ability to broadcast its favored version of history and events with a force none can match. This dominance of the portals of information reshapes the minds of others. The frequency with which the fables are told becomes seen by the innocent and unaware as indicative of the accuracy of the message. That you regularly publish something does not make it true. It just makes the average nation and person think it’s true.
America has always been an imperfect nation that engaged in many ignoble things along the road of national evolution. Slavery, the nearly total eclipse of Native American populations, and the strong-armed theft of the southwestern United States from an unfairly beaten and supine Mexican nation scar the nation’s path to greatness. American would rather you discount these things as mistakes from a dead past. But the past never fully dies; it exists in the present it helped create. These benighted events are as integral to American history as the march toward democracy, economic development and human rights. One set is the full counterpoise of the other. Those who say America is God’s country belittle God, reducing Him to a mortal who respects might and money more than compassion and goodness. America is not God’s nation; it is a man’s nation, save that man is stronger than any other at the moment. Like other nations, America is a mixture of good and bad, of noble and base, and of those who love democracy and those who so despise it that they would turn it into something different if given a chance at a chance. American democracy is not a monolith nor is it an altar at which all Americans worship. It is a composite human organism suffering a terrible affliction within. Some of its parts want no part of it. Ironically, the relatively smooth yet elitist operation of the system has provided those who would undermine democracy the money and power to do so.
As such, America is a great republic turning small. Today’s America represents a textbook on how to lose democracy not strengthen it. For African nations like Nigeria, there is no lesson more poignant. You will learn much about how to grow your democracy by understanding how America is forfeiting hers. By learning how America bankrupts its democracy, you just might discover how to keep your own.
Thus, this column frequently returns to the American scene not because America is a positive lesson. We examine America because too many of you perceive it as the pinnacle, when it is not. Once it was; now it is not. However, perception commonly trails reality. This err can be fatal to Africa. Thus we must cure it before it leads Africa backwards.
Last week, the American government criticized the pardon granted former Bayelsa Governor DSP Alamieyeseigha. Local media was alive with this story. However, something was missing in much of the analysis of this bilateral spat. Reasonable people may differ about the merits of the action so there is little profit in trampling this worn ground. Suffice it to say the act was legal. There also is little utility in arguing that America’s statement represented an unwarranted interference in Nigeria’s internal affairs as America is the supreme global interloper. The American government sees it as its divine right to tell others what to do. This is what America does. What most of the media commentary failed to address was the American government’s obvious hypocrisy in criticizing another nation of corruption when America could not handle what it had in hand.
While fustigating the pardon came, this same Administration recently found one, possibly two, banks willfully guilty of laundering drug money, with each institution washing nearly one billion dollars in dirty money. This was criminal action performed by senior bank officials. Yet, no criminal charges were had. The excuse was that invoking criminal sanctions would harm the banks. Because the banks were so large and important, such action would damage the economy. Put another way, the law cannot touch them because the officials hold important positions handling other people’s money. This begs a question: What do you call a banker who will not be charged for misappropriating other people’s funds? He is no longer a fiduciary custodian of the funds: he has become a thief in the making.
Rarely has such a feckless excuse been given by law enforcement officials unwilling to enforce the law. In effect, the Justice Department lent its good offices to injustice. Eschewing the constitution and the laws they swore to uphold, administration officials revealed that Money Power trumped justice in their universe.
No one was asking the government to set torch to the banks. Certain bank employees were guilty. Punishing them would not crash the banks or ruin the economy. We would have survived just as we make do when a bank official expires or falls ill. These people should have been sanctioned as severely as any drug pusher. Without willing bankers, the drug industry would not be as big, violent and lucrative as it is. It would not menace society as it does. Yet, the bankers were given a free pass. All the banks did was to pay a civil fine. The fine represents noting more than a “tax” on criminal behavior. Justice may be blind but she evidently has acquired a great deference to money.
Worse, the same Justice Department declared it will not investigate, let alone, prosecute any of the misconduct that precipitated the 2008 global financial meltdown and concomitant recession. This mocks justice. Again the excuse was a spineless wonder. Officials rationalized the financial wrongdoing was too complicated and too massive to prosecute. What! Every major financial crisis is built on a mountain of crimes. The 2008 decline was no exception. Systematic accounting fraud by senior officials in the largest financial institutions reduced the world economy to its knees. Over 20 trillion dollars in nominal wealth was destroyed. Millions lost jobs they shall never regain. Lives becoming synonymous with poverty and unable to bear the weight of their decline, hundreds took their own lives. Meanwhile, the incomes of bank officials responsible for the morass grew, as if they fed off the misery of the economy.
Authorities pursued wildcat criminals like Bernie Madoff whose one-man pyramid scheme inevitably collapsed. However, Madoff and those like him were fringe players in a larger drama. By foregoing any attempt to prosecute the wrongdoings leading to the financial crisis, the American justice system gave blanket pardon to the perpetrators of a trillion dollar criminal undertaking. In one swoop, the justice system immunized an entire class of professional wrongdoers. It was as if the Administration said, “You stole so much in such an arcane way, we’d rather you keep the loot!” Senior officials in the large financial houses are now above the law. As long as theft is not blatant and is aptly buried in the balance sheet, banker criminals will not be sanctioned and can remain among the most powerful and respected members of society.
Not only does this pardon shield past wrongs it gives a green light to future sinister conduct. By its permissiveness toward financial wrong, government has approbated the resumption of the hircine behavior that produced the 2008 crisis. This means another financial crisis is inevitable. Shorn of its nigh unintelligible legal jargon, the government’s position is that sophisticated financial crimes which profit large banks are no longer illegal. A nation has reached the height of financialism when criminal justice officials, in contravention of Congress’s legislative prerogative to define crime, unilaterally deem legal financial conduct every sentient person knows is illegal. Sadly, the height point of financialism is a low form of corruption, as barren as the public office corruption bedeviling Africa. However, because people have been indoctrinated to see America as the exemplar of good governance, we don’t see its corruption for what it is.
America’s big financial institutions are rife with crime but rifer with money able to fuel political campaigns. Consequently, financial firms have disproportionate sway over politicians, including the occupant of the White House. Yet, many firms are populated with senior officials who should be indicted. Instead, they deploy profits improperly acquired to buy undue influence in government. Because of this undue weight, government looks at the financial sector as sacrosanct to the extent that government has decreed that no serious crime can be committed therein. Wall Street is now America’s Vatican and Washington is but government for hire. In comparison, Nigeria’s prosecution of a handful of banking officials, while far from exemplary, still exceeds the American government’s performance in similar circumstance.
In all, the reasons given by the American government for effectively pardoning the entire class of people who crashed the global economy are not as colorable as the reasons given for the Alamieyeseigha pardon. There may be people with cause to question that pardon. The American government is not one of them. Washington should first remove the forest from its eye before shouting to everyone to come view the speck in Abuja’s. At bottom, America’s grouse is not against corruption. In its hubris, America believes it should define those forms of corruption other nations should commit and those they should not.
Meanwhile, people who celebrated Obama’s reelection, believing it would free him to become his truer self have gotten their wish. They now wish they hadn’t. The first months of Obama’s second term have been as pleasant as a rotting fish in one’s bed. This column has repeatedly declared Obama a consummate manipulator prone to do the opposite of what he says. For years, I have labeled him a Rockefeller Republican. That description has proven too ebullient. Although he continues to deceive people with his winsome personality, the man has become Nixonian in action.
During the campaign, he pledged allegiance to the middle class, vowing not to balance the budget on their backs. Yet, outside the glare of the media, his Administration recently sent tens of thousands of government workers on unpaid furlough. Many will be permanently dismissed, never again to find work. By and large, these workers voted for him, hoping against hope that he would bring the change he promised. What they got in return for their trust in this man is change that will impoverish them. They have learned the bitter lesson too late. To lean on Obama is to lean on a mirage. You will fall.
Obama also claimed he would not undermine Social Security and public health care benefits. However, he joined the Republican congressional leadership in temporizing as the deadline for comprehensive government budget cuts expired. Unable to hide delight as his boss’s political legerdemain, Obama’s chief economic advisor let the rat out of the trap. The advisor revealed the president’s public opposition to the cuts was political theatre. Obama actually wanted the reductions. The cuts would allow Obama to achieve the social service reductions he wanted yet allow him to escape blame for the austere measures. Obama could claim the Republicans forced him into cuts that, in reality, he wanted all along. In other words, He conspired with his Republican interlocutors to confound the electorate and as well as members of his own party who did not expect this level of fiscal austerity from him. That they did not know better was because they did not want to know their president. They would rather believe him than to know him. This may prove a costly preference.
From the onset of his presidency, Obama set his heart on dismantling the social safety architecture constructed by Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party’s greatest president. Though waving a liberal banner, Obama seeks the conservative Holy Grail: to shrink and privatize social security and public health.
That Obama does these things although contrary to the interests of the people who voted for him does not make him evil. Like most American politicians, he is more hired hand than elected official. In America, elections mean less than the money that funds them. Without funds, there is no campaign, thus no victory. It is a myth that Obama’s campaign was dependent on no one because it was fueled by millions of small donors. Without the vast sums given him by Wall Street interests, Obama would not have made it. His election was purchased by the few. To the few, he owes his loyalty. This is the way of modern American governance. Elections keep it democratic in form. However, the system has been distorted to where all major candidates are simply indebted to different members of the same class of deep-pocketed donors. Thus, Republicans are now extreme conservatives and the Democratic Party has become moderately conservative on economic matters. In substance, American government is no longer democratic in terms of abiding the will of the electorate. It is democratic only in the venal sense that it is now open for purchase to the highest bidder.
In the end, democracy is a rather odd species of governance. While other forms of governance leap at self-perpetuation, democracy recoils from longevity. Its core theme is the fundamental equality of man. Yet, not all people believe it. However, democracy does not penalize those who despise it. It allows them the freedom to amass the economic and political power to deracinate the very mode of government that provided them the space and freedom to prosper. A sad trait of human nature is the nearly universal and uncanny ability of elites to come to the wrong conclusion regarding the relationship between their personal attainment and the governing system in which they operate. The wealthier people become, the more they believe their fortune is unilaterally derived. They believe they achieved it despite the system. As such, the system becomes the enemy to their continued advance and fulfillment. They buy and bend the system to fit their purpose. The more it fits them, the less it accords with the majority of society. This is how democracy is placed on the auction block. This is the current state of American governance. It is nothing to celebrate. Emulate it at your peril for you will progress no further than you already have.
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